Something is a shell is the latest EP from Sofia Isella. In her 1962 poem Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath wrote, “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / and eat men like air.” It’s part threat, part revenge fantasy, and part raw confession of the narrator’s fury toward a patriarchal world. That visceral, ferocious energy is what first drew Sofia Isella to Plath, and it’s a force she channels frequently in her own music. Isella doesn’t flinch from the horror stitched into the fabric of the feminine experience. Citing writers like Plath, Margaret Atwood, and Mona Awad as germinal influences on her lyricism, Isella plunges into the underbelly of expectations of good-girlhood, of valiant womanhood. In her songs she splays out the stakes of it all, plumbing the viscera, unearthing the blood, guts, dirt, and decay lurking beneath.
