Isabella Komodromos is a classically trained pianist, who as a child split her time between Massachusetts and her father’s native Cyprus. Komodromos started piano lessons when she was six and quickly found herself gravitating towards minor keys and rewriting the lyrics in songbooks to be more macabre.

By the time she turned 13, she started vocal training, eventually attending Berklee College of Music, where she majored in songwriting and film scoring. Komodromos relocated to New York in 2020. Inspired by the city’s abrasiveness, she plunged into a musical and personal intensity to find her voice. The result is her solo art pop project Bella Litsa.

The bulk of her recently released full-length, studio album Drasticism was written between December of 2022 and February 2024 with much of her songwriting process occurring during periods of frenzied inspiration. “The choices I was making weren’t always good choices. I just was searching out all this extremity, like extreme love and extreme loss and to feel this crazy spectrum of things,” the Bella Litsa creative mastermind says. “The album is mostly asking: Why would I do that? But how could I not do that?”

Komodromos writes to cull her intense emotions and this personal excavation is part of her larger pursuit of the beautiful and divine. She cites her interests in astrophysics, synchronicities, Jungian psychoanalysis, the Book of Job, the Greek Orthodox church she attends, Andrei Tarkovsky and film scores for inspiration. Her work is rooted in a deeply-held belief that everything is beautiful and because every beautiful thing will end, everything is inherently sad. And in turn, songwriting is a relief, a way to preserve beauty. Similar to the drastic way she lives, she gravitates towards the extreme when it comes to her writing.

Bella Litsa writes to cull her intense emotions, and this personal excavation is part of her larger pursuit of the beautiful and divine. She taps her interest in astrophysics, synchronicities, Jungian psychoanalysis, the Book of Job, the Greek Orthodox church she attends, Andrei Tarkovsky, and film scores for inspiration. Because for Bella Litsa, everything is beautiful, and because every beautiful thing will end, everything is sad. Songwriting is a relief, a way to preserve beauty. And similar to her drastic way of living, she gravitates towards the extremes in her writing practice.

One spring day back in 2023, Komodromos came home in a strange, emotional state. She dat down at her desk, and eight hours later, she created the demo for “My Blue Eyes.” The next day she tried it again. After 12 hours, she had written “Tied Together by a Silver Thread,: a tragic epic inspired by the movements of classical music with three distinct sections. “It was probably the most inspired I was ever in my life,” she says. “I listen to it now and it just feels like my heart’s about to explode.”

That all-consuming feeling is what it feels like for the rising artist to dig deep into the core of her humanity. “I tell my psychoanalyst when we talk about songwriting: It’s like there’s a rope and I’m pulling on this rope, and the more I pull, the more the song is coming to me. But the song already existed. I’m slowly uncovering what was always there.” 

For Komodromos, her propensity towards the extremes is ultimately about a desire to connect, not only with herself but with others. “I get to say all these things that I keep in and then all of a sudden people are listening to you, and they’re witnessing the breaking down,” she says. “I feel like I get so tortured, especially singing live. I think being witnessed is the most powerful feeling you can have.”

Her work is intimate and emotionally potent material that echo with a dreamlike intensity. Her sound sees her blending vintage romance with experimental textures, a sort of haunted Americana-meeting-minimalist futurism, has helped her draw comparisons to Lana Del Rey, Fiona Apple and Weyes Blood — while being a vessel for connection and cantharis. “Bella Litsa is my sadness personified. It feels like the closest I can get to my shadow, consciously,” Komodromos says. 

Drasticism includes the previously released, “Angelica,” “Passion Plug,” “Never Ending Movie,” the Tori Amos and Lonny-like “1117” and the album’s latest “Tied Together By a Silver String.” Continuing a run of dramatic, remarkably cinematic yet deeply intimate material, “Tied Together By a Silver String” is a hauntingly gorgeous, lushly arranged song that features a mesh of elements of old-school balladry, rock, film scores and classical music. The rising artist’s equally gorgeous and expressive vocal dances and floats over the song’s arrangement. And much like its predecessor, the song evokes a sense of almost unreconcilable inner conflict.

Directed by Dylan Gee whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The FADER, Stereogum, NYLON and more, was shot entirely on form and thermal camera in Southern California’s Frazier Park. Fittingly, the cinematic visual evokes the swooning heart at the core of the song.