ISQ

After eight years away, ISQ returns with a significant shift in her sound – darker, guitar-driven and cinematic, infused with alternative pop and jazz soundscapes.

The new record is strongly inspired by women's lives; the ones lived loudly and the ones lived in careful silence, she says.

ISQ – vocalist and songwriter Irene Serra – plays The Folklore Rooms, Brighton (matinee show) on Saturday. November 7.

“The songs on this album were a long time in the making,” ISQ explains. “This is my attempt to make sense of a shifting world and of the elusive human condition – its unexpected beauty and moments of light, alongside the sadness, the quiet and the everyday violence it contains. It is a tribute to my mother’s resilience and to the countless women whose stories echo her own.”

Across eight tracks, the record moves between the personal and the political – mountain walks and migrant crossings, mother-daughter relationships and modern dating, deception and survival.

“It is an album about inheritance: what we are handed, what we carry and what it takes to find your own voice inside it.

“The older I get, the more convinced I become that none of us arrives anywhere entirely by ourselves. That idea runs through opener On Shoulders of Giants, a soft alt-pop tune written during Italian ski tours. With its title taken from Isaac Newton's famous quote, the song began as a love letter to the mountains that grew into something bigger – a reflection on gratitude and the people who help shape our journeys.

“From there, the album turns inward. Faded traces the subtle decay of one’s self inside a controlling relationship – inspired by watching a friend disappear into someone else's version of them before finding their way back to clarity.”

No Time At All was inspired by days spent with family and a growing conviction that quality time is the thing we should actually be chasing.

Family and migration sit at the album's centre. Kindred Spirit was shaped by ISQ's mother's journey from southern Sicily to Denmark in the early 1980s, and by the story of Carola Rackete, the rescue-boat captain arrested for bringing migrants safely ashore.

Lead single Animal looks at that same journey through a daughter's eyes – the friction of growing up liberal in Copenhagen with a mother raised in traditional Sicily and the understanding that arrived only with time.

As the album’s closing statement, She Walks Through Fire pulls it all together, “reclaiming the witch archetype as a symbol of feminine wisdom, resilience and care for the earth.”

An important thread running through the song is the way society treats women as they age. Older women's voices are frequently marginalised in media, culture and public life, despite the fact that age often brings perspective, resilience and hard-earned insight, she says.

“She Walks Through Fire brings together many of the album’s central themes: feminine resilience, intergenerational wisdom, environmental responsibility, social justice and the importance of listening to voices that society too often ignores.”