We’re a couple weeks out from the release of recent Artist To Watch honoree Indigo De Souza’s sophomore album, Any Shape You Take. We’ve heard a couple songs from it already, “Kill Me” and “Hold U,” which both made it onto our best songs of the week list when they came out, and today De Souza is back with another one, “Real Pain.” It’s the album’s glittering and fractured centerpiece, which starts off crisp and driving and turns into something muddy and uncomfortable before swinging back around the other way yet again.

Here’s De Souza on the song and how it came together:

“‘Real Pain’ is about facing grief and loss and having compassion for yourself in that space. It’s about learning to be unafraid of experiencing a full spectrum of emotion, and welcoming the way it teaches you and changes you. For one of the sections in the song, I put out an invitation for people to anonymously send me voice memos of “screams, yells, and anything else”. I layered the voices on top of one another to embody a kind of collective experience. I felt an incredible catharsis hearing their voices stacked with mine. While we live such separate lives, we are connected in the way that we all navigate immense amounts of pain and love and fear in our bodies every day. It can be hard to be a person! It’s okay to acknowledge that sometimes. It’s okay to feel things fully and to allow others space to do the same.

Listen below.

Any Shape You Take is out 8/27 via Saddle Creek. Pre-order it here.