Here’s a song that should come with its own emotional satisfaction guarantee: Without a doubt, you will feel something—or, perhaps more accurately, many things—while listening to it. Severe pangs of regret. The nostalgia that swells behind your eyes when faced with a glossy photo of your smiling adolescent self. Bottomless sorrow for memories you can no longer remember, or can’t seem to forget. The sudden belief in a love that is necessary and terrifying. The trembling hope for an unnamed future.

After dressing her disarmingly blunt musings up in Auto-Tuned synth-pop, swirling grunge, rumbling indie rock, and bittersweet funk on her 2021 breakthrough, Any Shape You Take, Indigo De Souza, tries something new on “Younger & Dumber”: honest-to-goodness power balladry. Think ’90s country-pop queen Faith Hill, but with a smaller budget and a bigger sense of inner turmoil. She started to write the song as a frank conversation with her flailing younger self and delivers every conflicted line as if her life depended on it. “You came to hurt me in all the right places/Made me somebody,” she ruminates, as somber piano and acoustic guitar accentuate the ache. The song’s apex—the moment when Celine Dion would be beating her chest—is both triumphant and destructive, and it’s followed by a guitar solo that seems primed to ascend to the stratosphere before fizzling out on the runway. Soul-baring catharsis has its costs, and De Souza is unafraid, launching a flaming missile at the heart.