Sofia Isella doesn’t so much enter a room as she colonises it — like Boudica with better eyeliner and a microphone instead of a chariot. At SWG3 in Glasgow, her first Scottish headline show felt less like a debut and more like a declaration: the kind of night that makes you believe you’ll be bragging in ten years about seeing her “back when she was still playing clubs.”

She began with “Hot Gum”, a pop sucker-punch that fizzes like a mouthful of sherbet and bites like broken glass. It’s the sort of song that makes the walls sweat, and the crowd screamed as though it were already a greatest hit. Later, when she returned to it for the encore — literally swallowed by her audience, singing fully submerged in their arms — it was transformed from a playful opener into a victory lap, a ritual re-birth.

Isella knows when to strip everything back. “Josephine” arrived in an almost-whisper, a cowboy hat and guitar perched like props from another century. The hush she conjured felt borrowed from folk clubs long gone, but with a distinctly modern twitch — Lana Del Rey if she weren’t addicted to irony, Cat Power if she’d grown up scrolling rather than chain-smoking.

That quiet was shattered by “Dogs Diner”, snarling and sleazy, her voice oscillating between coo and curse.

By the time she slid to the piano for an unreleased ballad, drawn from the darker waters of “Numbers 31:17–18”, had her piano, wringing beauty out of Biblical carnage. It was the sort of moment that reminded me of early Tori Amos — but if Amos had been raised on TikTok, Roe v. Wade rage and a diet of feminist zines.

Isella doesn’t tiptoe around politics; she confessed that, as a teenager, she was told to stay quiet to avoid “dividing an audience.” Then Roe was overturned, and she realised silence was complicity. Cue a generation-defining battle hymn whispered by 500 Glaswegians as though in a single conspiratorial breath. She mined biblical carnage for something fragile and furious, her voice arcing from pin-drop to possession.

She’s still new enough to blush about asking fans to follow her on Instagram — “I added people to invite them to my first shows” — but already adored with the kind of feverish devotion you’d expect for a Beatle, or at least a Bieber. From the front rows came banshee screams and posters begging her to fling so much as a T-shirt their way; if Sofia spat out her chewing gum mid-set, there’d be a riot to catch it.

And then, chaos: “Crowd Caffeine”, a song as manic as its title suggests, Isella used a Bugs Bunny metaphor to instruct the crowd how high she wanted the m to sing the chorus. “Louder!” she ordered, orchestrating the audience as though they were instruments she’d invented, wringing roars from their throats until the floor felt like it might buckle.

When she played “The Well”, she admitted it was the first time she’d heard her own words sung back to her. That small confession lit the room — suddenly 500 Glaswegians became co-conspirators, crooning her diary lines like hymns.

But reverence doesn’t last long in Sophia Izella’s world. “The Doll People” had her crawling and staggering as if possessed, witchy and unhinged, the crowd locked into her trance. If Florence Welch is a pagan priestess, Izella is the exorcist’s nightmare: joyous, grotesque, impossible to look away from. And with “Sex Concept,” she left the stage altogether, carried aloft by her audience in a great circle, saint and siren all at once, rewriting the rules of what a pop star’s body can do in the hands of her believers.

The night closed on “Future”, its last bars dissolving into the fever of an encore. And then “Hot Gum” again, but louder, bigger, messier, her voice rising above a mass of bodies that seemed ready to tear the ceiling off.

Sofia Izella isn’t waiting patiently for her coronation. She’s already here, devouring stages with a sound that flickers between the whisper of a matchstick and the snarl of a swamp witch. At SWG3, she proved she can hold an audience like a secret — or like a hostage. Either way, they’ll follow her anywhere.

Words & Pictures: Angela Canavan @ zombiefang_