On Bella Litsa’s debut album Drasticism, extremity is an artistic pursuit. Out in February on Records Man, Records, Drasticism urgently asks: How far can you, or should you, take the things in your life, whether they be a feeling, a relationship, a melody? What is lost, and what is gained? Across 11 sweeping and spectral baroque pop songs, Bella Litsa explores what it means to live as the title suggests: drastically.
Taking inspiration from everything from Rachmaninoff to Lana Del Rey to Daft Punk, Drasticism combines 90s-inspired guitars, mellotron, and cinematic orchestral arrangements to conjure a grandiose world. At the core of it all is Bella Litsa’s haunting, operatic voice, which brings to mind the rich, classical beauty of Weyes Blood. The songs feel distinctly carved from the here and now, but are veiled in a kind of romantic transcendence: The orchestral swells and decays, delayed releases, lush stacks of harmonies, and exquisite overwhelm of sound conjures the narcotic wash of the tide, a heartbeat, a prayer—tapping into something cosmic and ancient, a sound we can all hear if only we listen hard enough.
A classically trained pianist, Bella Litsa grew up between her home state of Massachusetts and Cyprus, where her father is from. She started piano lessons at age 6 and soon found herself gravitating towards minor keys and rewriting the lyrics in songbooks to be more macabre. When she was 13, she started vocal training, eventually majoring in songwriting and film scoring at Berklee College of Music. She moved to New York City in 2020, where, inspired by the city’s abrasiveness, she plunged into a musical and personal intensity to find her voice. Bella Litsa wrote the bulk of Drasticism between December 2022 and February 2024, with much of her songwriting process happening in frenzied sessions of 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,” says Bella Litsa. “The album is mostly asking: Why would I do that? But how could I not do that?”
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 day in the spring of 2023, she came home in a strange, emotional state. She sat down at her desk, and eight hours later, the demo for “My Blue Eyes” was done. A song from nothing. The next day, she tried doing it again. This time, 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 phases. “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 Bella Litsa to excavate the core of her own 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.”
Ultimately, this propensity towards the extremes is about a desire to connect, not only with herself but with other people. “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.”
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