Bella Litsa explores what it means to live life drastically. Crafting intimate, lush, and emotionally potent songs that echo with dreamlike intensity, Litsa’s music is a search for stillness, beauty, and peace in an ever-shifting world. Blending vintage romance with experimental textures, where haunted Americana meets minimalist futurism, the core of it all is Bella Litsa’s haunting, operatic voice, which evokes the classical beauty of Weyes Blood and female leads like Lana Del Rey and Fiona Apple.
Today, the Brooklyner has announced her debut record, Drasticism, will arrive on February 20 via Records Man, Records, and alongside the announcement, she’s sharing her gorgeous new single “Passion Plug” and accompanying music video.
“This song came on as a fever,” shares Litsa. “The lyrics flowed out without stopping. I felt like begging someone to remember the magic of being together, and wishing I could hate them as it would feel so much easier. I couldn’t though. Recording this song was a special moment. My bass player, Abe Nouri, one of the best musicians I’ve had the honor of working with, has a deep background of jazz – a departure from my traditionally baroque sound. I’m always holding him back a bit when we play most of the songs, to keep them in the baroque style and harmony. No funny business! I would say. But recording this song, I said – go wild. And he did.”
The video features Litsa in her element – dancing. “I grew up dancing – ballet, tap, jazz, and the works and dancing certainly runs in my blood,” she adds. “My Nana was an incredible dancer, and danced at every family gathering with us all until she passed. We still get together and dance. It’s a deeply sentimental and freeing act for me, and I’m so happy to intertwine it with my music. I worked with Anna Wittenberg on the choreography – we worked on the choreo for about 3 months before shooting. We were inspired by Bob Fosse, Martha Graham, and, although I can’t name them all, Anna has a whole slew of knowledge and passion for the craft that brought the song to life, honestly. The director, Fiona Kane, really embedded the video with its life & color.”
Earlier this summer, Litsa teased the record with two of the album’s tracks — “1117” and “Never Ending Movie” quickly proving herself an artist to watch with early praise from Ones To Watch, That Eric Alper (that’s me!), Nina Protocol, Mindies, Alfitude, and more.
Next week, Litsa will join Dark Tea and Truman Flyer at Nightclub 101 on October 8th. Find tickets HERE.
On Bella Litsa’s debut album Drasticism, extremity is an artistic pursuit. 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. 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.”
Drasticism Tracklisting
Saint Mishima
1117
Never Ending Movie
Passion Plug
Inside a Seashell
My Blue Eyes
The Fall
Darker
Sailor
Tied Together by a Silver Thread
Angelica