Indigo De Souza’s second album is officially on its way, and if lead single and closing cut “Kill Me” is any indication at all, Any Shape You Take is going to be a stunner. “Kill Me” arrived Tuesday alongside a music video and the details of De Souza’s forthcoming album, the North Carolina singer/songwriter’s first for Saddle Creek, coming Aug. 27.
At first blush, “Kill Me” seems strangely sweet—”Kill me slowly, take me with you / Down to the garden where magnolias bloom,” De Souza sings, her vocals lilting over a single electric guitar. A forceful low end propels the song higher and higher into gear, with De Souza outright howling in its choruses—over that dynamic pop-rock framework, she layers lyrics that are at turns harrowing, funny, horny, relatable, or all of the above at once. Even the outro’s explosively cathartic refrain is cleverly understated: “Tell them that I wasn’t having much fun,” De Souza sings, as if making a polite excuse to head home early. It’s a glorious, gut-spilling mess, rendered as an irresistible rock track.
De Souza says of her new song:
I wrote “Kill Me” sometime in 2018 when I was really tired and fucked up in a lot of ways. I was deeply consumed in a big crazy love and coming to terms with the reality of living with mental illness. I recorded myself stream-of-conscious singing it on the kitchen floor at night with my laptop cam. I found the video about a year later, and could barely recognize the person singing. It was such a strange feeling watching the video because I couldn’t remember writing the song, but little bits and pieces of it felt familiar to me. It felt like it had been a lot longer than a year.
The “Kill Me” video, meanwhile, combines a wrestling match with a food fight, drawing inspiration from multimedia artist, performer and cam girl Lindsay Dye’s cake sitting culture. The clip’s strobe-lit climax, in which De Souza herself cake sits, is a gripping accompaniment to the song’s cymbal-crashing outro. “We wanted to make a film about performance and stage an event that would get the crew and actors going,” director Jordan Alexander says of the video in a statement. “Cake sitting is this wonderful art form, rampant with metaphors of creation and destruction, engaging in equal parts with desire and disgust. It lends itself to the song and Indigo came over to test it out and was way better at it than I am.”
De Souza co-produced Any Shape You Take alongside Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee), and recorded it at Betty’s, Sylvan Esso’s Chapel Hill, N.C., studio. She released her debut album I Love My Mom in 2018—the opening track was called “How I Get Myself Killed.”
De Souza’s North American tour in support of her new record begins with two nights of album release shows in her hometown of Asheville, N.C. She’ll wind her way across the States for nine more shows before wrapping up in Los Angeles on Oct. 15. Ticket pre-sale has already started, and the official on-sale starts Friday, June 18, at 10 a.m. ET. Grab yours here.
Watch the “Kill Me” video below, and see the details of Any Shape You Take and De Souza’s tour dates further down. You can preorder the record right here.
Any Shape You Take Tracklist:
01. 17
02. Darker Than Death
03. Die/Cry
04. Pretty Pictures
05. Real Pain
06. Bad Dream
07. Late Night Crawlers
08. Hold U
09. Way Out
10. Kill Me
Any Shape You Take Album Art:
Indigo De Souza 2021 Tour Dates:
August
26 – Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle
27 – Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle Sold Out
28 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle Backroom
29 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
September
21 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd
22 – Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA
24 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere Zone 1
26 – Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall
30 – Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen
October
11 – San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of the Hill
15 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo
