"No one can prepare us for how insane it is to be alive," says Indigo De Souza. "How many times we will have to rise from the ashes and what courage it will take." The North Carolina artist shares in a press statement that she wrote "Younger & Dumber," the first single off her forthcoming third album All of This Will End, as a love letter to her inner child. The song's warm, melancholy opening notes set the tone as De Souza recounts her loss of innocence, "growing up defeated by a world brutally littered with trash, violence and grief" and the privilege and weight of feeling so much.
The song's music video, directed by De Souza, is just as emotionally expressive and spectacular. Home video clips of De Souza as a child, dancing and baking with her family, are juxtaposed with clips of her performing the song in a costume designed by her and her mother, the artist Kimberly Oberhammer (who also created the album art). She says she took psilocybin for the shoot and that she has a specific way of dancing when on mushrooms; visually, she resembles an exotic sea creature in the video, thrashing gracefully in pearly ruffled tulle, six fleshy tentacles falling from her headpiece.
Eventually the mask comes off, rain pours and De Souza wails: "And the love I feel is so powerful / it'll meet you anywhere." De Souza's fighting for the belief that not only can she rise from the ashes of a dumpster-fire world, but that she can revel in the flames and find beauty in their flicker.
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