SOFIA ISELLA is a modern-day femme fatale

SOFIA ISELLA is mid-tour. In fact, she’s so busy that we get the time for our transatlantic call mixed up somewhere between the US’s many time zones. Our 9am transpires to be an 8am, and, if I didn’t know better, I’d think the twenty-year-old singer’s cool rasp and hair-over-the-face look was due to the earlier than expected wake-up call. Really, though, ISELLA is just as unfazed as her online presence leads one to believe. Between photoshoots displaying the undead allure of a vampire (in some she’s literally covered in dirt), to a website self-prescribing as a ‘Slut for words’, to a tour titled ‘You’ll Understand, Dick’, ISELLA’s gothic demeanour is as captivating as her darkly poetic lyrics.

Despite her honed and tenebrous aesthetic, however, the songstress isn’t just an artistic enigma — nor a niche. She’s spent the past few years making solid moves in the industry, discounting the countless hours spent practicing violin from the age of three and songwriting from eight. Even without her wealth of musicality, though, ISELLA has cultivated a career that speaks for itself — she’s supported Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour at Wembley (a gig for which she was hand-selected for by the ‘Cruel Summer’ singer), walked for Ann Demeulemeester at Paris Fashion Week and racked up millions of listens on her new EP, I’m camera .

But right now, ISELLA is so deeply entrenched in tour mode that she “literally can’t think of a single other thing”. It’s this hyper-focus that makes her so compelling — as well as the days of performing to no one in empty shopping malls, which taught her “how to capture people’s attention who don’t want their attention captured”. So, while ISELLA may have only started to release music properly back in 2022, a thirty-minute call is more than enough to see that attention-capturing ability has persisted — and to understand why the LA-based artist has already earned her stripes as a modern-day femme fatale.