They Have Indie-Pop in Cyberspace: The World of isobel
Fresh off a summer tour with Racing Mount Pleasant, isobel is proving to be a wiry voice cutting through the arguably oversaturated noise of indie pop in 2026. Her sound, entirely self-produced alongside her frequent collaborator Kole Laviolette (kidlucky), seamlessly stitches the mature instrumentation of Fiona Apple with the layered experimentation of Björk into a modernized version. Atop her guitar playing, you’ll hear gorgeous strings, soft keys, and enchanting flute as much as gritty static, electronic blips, and literal bells and whistles. The singer-songwriter from Grand Rapids, Michigan, is thoughtfully carving out a lane of her own.
isobel by Jeffery Jin
Isobel’s most well-known songs, “undercover” and “limn,” have amassed over 1.2 million streams since the early months of 2026. She premiered “limn” on Anthony Fantano’s Twitch stream back in December 2025, where he gave a co-sign and urged her to release it. “limn” landed on Spotify editorial playlists like New Music Friday, Lorem, and All New Indie, and “undercover” is currently a lead track on Spotify’s Bedroom Pop playlist. While they have their similarities, side by side, these tracks showcase isobel’s spectrum of sound: “undercover” being fast-paced and punchy and “limn” being slow and ethereal. Her most recent single, “rachel,” is a bright piece of pop-rock sprinkled with childlike teasing and some lyrics sung in Chinese. It also premiered via Twitch stream as an unreleased track, crowning her and kidlucky as champions of a Song Wars competition hosted by Niztopia, a music-focused streamer and content creator.
Isobel’s distinctiveness stretches beyond music to her online presence. I say “online” rather than “social media” because the real content lives on isobel’s web. Entirely self-coded over the course of two years, isobel’s web is an interactive personal site hosted by Neocities, a free web hosting service. The website is home to a microblog, a long-form blog, released tracks and old demos, videos and pictures, a message board, and a hyperlink titled “Purrgatory” (which you should absolutely click on).
The cute pixel font and trail of glitter that follows your cursor only amplify the digital world surrounding isobel. And the deeper you dive, the closer you get to the core of her artistry. Her long-form blog is full of poetry, intimate details behind specific songs, references to a lost EP called boyish, and personal anecdotes about self-doubt, life as a queer woman in today’s society, and the never-ending race against time. It’s hard to decide which one — the website or the music — is more vulnerable.
Isobel’s discography is small in size but powerful in sound, reminiscent of her namesake’s creator (Björk’s “Isobel”). She’s only been officially releasing music since January 2025, churning out indie-art pop banger after indie-art pop banger, adding up to six singles in a little over a year. But despite the limited catalog, her unreleased music isn’t something she necessarily attempts to mystify. Scattered throughout her website and socials are Easter eggs in the form of written-out lyrics or half-baked voice-memo snippets. Without giving too much away because there’s great fun in the egg hunt, many of these glimpses look toward isobel’s upcoming debut album, scarlet.
In a recent interview with @headphoneemoji while on tour with Racing Mount Pleasant, isobel talked about the project’s primary theme: how varied perception breeds contradiction. Isobel referenced female characters in media being represented often as one-dimensional, when, in reality, women are just as multifaceted as other human beings.
Watch headphoneemoji’s interview with isobel on YouTube.
Additionally, she discussed the blurred lines between self-concept and reality and how that ties into writing. While the medium can open doors for self-expression, the structure of lyrics or poetry can also feel limiting, isobel shared.
“In [scarlet], there’s a character who’s maybe, kind of like some abstraction of me,” isobel said. “And she says one thing, but inside she’s another. And it’s up to you to decipher what is truth and what is lie… I like this idea of an unreliable narrator because I think that’s really true to life. Our perceptions are our reality.”
Listeners can expect scarlet to make its debut before the year’s end, which isobel wishes could happen sooner rather than later. In her first blog post since May, she said that behind-the-scenes logistics are slowing the process. So, while there isn’t an estimated release date yet — as they say, you can’t rush greatness — you have plenty of time to get stuck in isobel’s web while there’s more waiting to be spun.
Listen to “rachel” now on all streaming platforms.
