Indigo De Souza has a superpower for distilling overwhelming emotion in song. Her latest single "Younger & Dumber" is the first we've heard from her since her gripping 2021 sophomore album Any Shape You Take, and it has the capacity to unlock childhood-sourced tears and reflective grins. It's a slow-building ballad with pedal steel waves and percussive gusts wherein De Souza combines realizations from her younger years that have sculpted her into the human she is now.
"‘Younger and Dumber’ is a flood beam of my emotional and spiritual human experience," De Souza said. "My growing up defeated by a world brutally littered with trash, violence and grief, and somehow finding beauty, purpose, and boundless love existing in the same place... When you're young, you don't know any better, but you learn from your experiences, and then you become somebody who’s been alive and learning. [This song is] also about how heartbreaking that is; to start as a child with vivid curiosity, innocent imagination and joy, and for the world to end up being kind of brutal to be a part of. This song is a love letter to everyone’s inner child. No one can prepare us for how insane it is to be alive. How many times we will have to rise from the ashes and what courage it will take.”
The single comes with a video that De Souza directed herself in which she wears a shimmery light pink ensemble that makes her look like a mythical creature, a new kind of jellyfish. In the visual, she stretches and elongates her limbs, crawls and twirls on the floor, and burrows into the ground. The choreography is chopped up with snippets of De Souza's childhood films. “I took psilocybin for the shoot," she revealed. "I have a very specific way of dancing when I’m on mushrooms. The movements feel like electricity rising up from the earth through ancient networks of mycelium. It feels like the trees and plants are moving my body for me and I am just surrendering. It feels so clear to me now more than ever, how important it is to unabashedly embody my truest spirit.”
Watch the video for "Younger & Dumber" below, and pre-order All of This Will End here.
