Being twenty-one carries both sweetness and strain when you are a girl, and Sofia Isella navigates that mix the way someone learns to find their footing in unfamiliar terrain. Being a teenage girl means every feeling shows up turned all the way up. You are told what a “good girl” should sound like, dress like, want, and somewhere underneath all that, an inner voice is asking who you actually are. That tension between expectation and self is where girlhood begins to turn into womanhood. It is confusing and exhausting, but it is also where you begin to build your own language.

For Sofia Isella, that language is music. As many girls do to survive confusion, Isella turned to crafting during her adolescence, creating songs and images; the small rituals that let you try on different versions of yourself. Crafting her own sound, her music became a way of saying, ‘This is who I am right now,’ and accepting that she is still in the middle of becoming. Her latest EP, Something is a shell, comes out of very different states of mind. “I had two experiences writing this EP. I was either having a hilarious time laughing alone very loudly in my dark bedroom, or I was crying in daylight in the back of a tour van with a guitar,” she explains. “The lyrics are some of my favorite I’ve ever written.” Both moods shaped the project in a way that feels true to how she works. As her platform grows, so does the conversation surrounding her image: fashion, performance, and the visual choices that accompany her music everywhere she goes. For Sofia, these components are part of the same process. “Imagery is as important to me as sound. I love the visual world, and I live inside it constantly.”

In this new chapter, her songs address the way youth is distorted and marketed, especially online. “It began with numbers and having many arguments with Christians about it, and being enraged about how children were given up for sex, and then noticing how when girls in porn or girls on the internet try to get men to sign up for their link, they try to act as young as possible,” she explains. “They wear kids’ clothes, they behave as if their brain is five years old, but have the sex drive of a grown man.” Her childhood shaped her approach to work; being homeschooled, always moving, always creating meant work was woven into every part of her life. “I have never stopped working since I was little. It’s my whole world. Being homeschooled gives you a bullshit luscious amount of free time, along with no concept of judgment.” Work became something steady and constant, something she could always return to–especially writing. Drawing from writers who refuse to look away from uncomfortable truths, including Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, and Mona Awad—women who turned observation into a tool. 

When Sofia writes about something that troubles her, she keeps going instead of trying to make it easier to digest. “I’m much more uncomfortable with the topics happening in real life than I am writing about it.” Turning lyrics into a live performance, once onstage, the songs take on their own emotional shape according to the atmosphere. “All nights are different. Sometimes a song hits me more one night than a different one. Depending on what’s going on in my life, and watching the crowd.” Although each audience changes the atmosphere, with Sofia letting the songs land wherever they need to that night, once online, general listeners tend to lift one lyric from her songs and make it their mood for the day. She watches those fragments travel on their own. “People have gone through very detailed interpretations of my lyrics, and some of their analysis is so striking and smart that it makes me feel my own lyrics in a way I haven’t before. But in general, if they’re just using one lyric and fixating on it, that’s powerful.” Although the girls quoting her lyrics may not know the full story, they certainly recognize the feeling behind it, and that connection alone seems to be more than enough for Isella.

This story appears in the pages of V158: now available for purchase!

Photography Dennis Leupold
Fashion Matthew Mazur
Hair Ericka Verrett (A-Frame)
Makeup Melissa Hernandez (A-Frame)
Set Design Ali Gallagher
Set Design Leadman Zoran Radanovich
Casting Kev Ponce
Production Sophie Meister (Locals Worldwide)
Photo Assistants Tom Blanco, Ben Chant
Fashion Assistant Zander Slayton
Hair Assistant Niko Verrett
Makeup Assistant Karissa O’Hanlon
Studio Agpwest Studio
Studio Manager Alexey Galetskiy (Agp NYC)