Indigo De Souza ‘All of This Will End’ Review: A Snapshot of an Artist Trying to Figure It All Out

Indigo De Souza makes music engineered to put you, as the kids say, in your feels. Whether she’s cross or crestfallen, cheerful or cranky, sometimes a combination of all four, it’s remarkable how much emotion the singer-songwriter squeezes out of a few decidedly simple phrases. On “Time Back,” the opening track of All of This Will End, she turns a series of plainspoken lyrics—“You’re bad/You suck/You fucked me up”—into a soul-bearing scolding session for a former lover. The equally disgruntled “You Can Be Mean” finds her going straight for the jugular: “I can’t believe I let you touch my body/I can’t believe I let you get inside.”

The album’s greatest asset is its immediacy, with its best songs seemingly allowing De Souza to get things off of her chest after years of holding it all in. It’s a shame, then, that All of This Will End often also indulges indie-twee clichés. The backing horn heard on “Parking Lot” recalls too many 2000s-era indie-pop cuts to count, and the electro-dance stylings of “Smog,” featuring hackneyed lyrics about coming “alive in the night time, when everybody else is done,” strains to produce an anthemic moment of catharsis instead of naturally arriving at one.

By contrast, “Wasting Your Time” boasts a booming percussion section and loads of raging electric guitar riffs—an apt fit for the volatile torrent of self-criticism De Souza lobs at herself throughout. “I feel pretty dumb/Pretty dumb/When you call,” she admits, before claiming in the very next line that she feels “overall” pretty dumb. On the comparatively stripped-down “Losing,” she reflects on her inability to prevent a wave of personal developments occurring in and around her personal life—“There is nothing I can do/When the winds of change blow through”—and feels “like an idiot” whenever she tries too hard to stop them.

But De Souza never beats herself up too much. After all, as she makes clear on the trenchant title track—right after rightfully asserting that “there’s only moving through and trying your best” and that “sometimes it’s not enough”—who gives a fuck about any of this in the long run? Regardless how she may feel in the immediate moment, “all of this will end” anyway.

This exonerating ethos is most stirringly realized on the closing track, “Younger and Dumber,” where De Souza assures her adolescent self that the many mistakes she’s soon to make in life are more due to her not knowing any “better” in the immediate moment. “Which way will I run when I want something new?” she asks herself with a slight quiver in her voice, suggesting that even with her accumulated experiences, she’s still not certain of what may come next. All of This Will End doesn’t provide many definite answers to this question, but it does offer a cogent enough snapshot of an artist attempting—and sometimes failing—to figure it all out.