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Dec 9, 2025
'Straight to the fans': How this singer became a social media sensation, one post at a time
'Straight to the fans': How this singer became a social media sensation, one post at a time
The Sydney Morning Herald
"I want people to feel more comfortable with being ugly and being disgusting and being grotesque, and not having to constantly try to keep our faces so very still and nice and perfect and pretty," says 20-year-old musician Sofia Isella. "That's something I talk about in my shows a lot, and that I crave a lot from myself and from the crowd."
Isella - born and based in Los Angeles, apart from a couple of years aged 15 to 17 on Queensland's Gold Coast - is a fiercely independent artist whose profile has risen exponentially over the past couple of years thanks in large part to the image-obsessed internet. On Instagram, she has 2.4 million followers; on TikTok, 1.4 million. On Spotify, she's racking up 1.2 million listeners a month.
Her videos are low-fi affairs, in which the decidedly photogenic Isella does her best to simultaneously draw and reject the eye. She pulls down the waistband of her pants, covers herself in mud and wades into a crowd of teenage girls, asking if they're comfortable with touching and being touched. She rages against the fetishistic male gaze, and sings about the ill effects of porn culture, the beauty myth and the internet in general.
"Turns out all of human knowledge at our fingertips made us dumb," she sings in one song. "Lost my connection to reality stepping into a virtual one."
