‘Straight to the fans’: How this singer became a social media sensation, one post at a time

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“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, having spent 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.

Sofia Isella on stage in France in August.

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.”

It’s fair to say that the social media ban that comes into effect on December 10 might strike this artist as something of a double-edged sword.

Isella grew up in an artistic household. Her father is the Chile-born cinematographer Claudio Miranda, an Oscar winner for Life of Pi (he also shot Top Gun: Maverick and F1), and her mother, Kelli Bean, is a writer.

“I grew up with incredible parents who were very supportive of me, and that is very rare,” she says. “There was never a sense of, ‘Oh, there’s a back-up plan – here’s a thing you should do instead.’ I always knew music would be my career.”

Isella was homeschooled – apart from one semester on the Gold Coast, where she went to high school just to see what it was like – and given free rein to pursue whatever took her fancy. From the age of three she learnt classical violin; by eight, she was writing songs; at 12, she recorded her first album, Baby Star.

“I think there are three people in the world that have that CD,” she says, laughing. “And I pray to God they keep it very close to their hearts.”

The one thing she didn’t have, somewhat surprisingly given the role social media has played in her career, was a phone. But once she did get one, she set about learning how to build an audience for her music using it.

“I used to post daily, and it wasn’t very good,” she says. “Eventually, I just learnt what people like to watch. I spent so much time learning how to do that.”

The first time something went viral, it was, she says, a bit of a shock. “By viral, I mean like 100,000 views,” she says. “Previous to that, I had like 42 followers. So that was a big moment.”

Isella first performed live on the Gold Coast in 2021. “I would play malls, I would play to tumbleweeds, I would play to empty rooms, with maybe a grown man at the bar,” she says.

The last time she played in Australia, three years ago, she sold out the venue, but she had to work hard for it. “Half of the people there were my friends, and the other half were people I individually DMed by going through my Instagram followers,” she says.

Isella – seen here at Leeds Festival in the UK in August – performs alone, with five different instruments on stage.

This time is different. She’s been on the bill for the Spilt Milk festival, below superstars Kendrick Lamar and Doechii, and she’s doing some headline sideshows of her own. But she’s still doing it her own way.

“You know, I don’t have a label. I don’t have a lot of people pushing me. It’s just coming straight from my iPhone,” she says.

“The feeling of control is a great thing. Everything is just in your hands. It’s very much straight to the fans from the artist directly, which is incredible.”

Sofia Isella plays the Triffid in Brisbane on December 9, the Palais in St Kilda on December 10, Roundhouse Sydney on December 12, and Spilt Milk Canberra and Gold Coast December 13-14. Details: sofiaisella.com