Costa, Idra and Ema. Three kids in their twenties bursting with energy and passion, eager to make music without compromises, to stay true to themselves and nothing else.
I’m here sitting on a dune on the island of Fuerteventura with Costa - singer, songwriter and bass player of the newly-born Italian band Isla. Their genre can be described as indie/alternative pop and their first single, “D e m o 0 1”, was released just now, on the 5th of February. A new song will be released every month from now on and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
But let’s hear from one of them personally.
Isla is the desire to bring our listeners on a journey to our desert island, to share our loneliness, so that in a way we can all feel less alone.
First and foremost, can you tell our readers why you picked Isla as your stage name? Who suggested it?
Well, it is really tough to trace back the origin of a name. I might be wrong, but I believe it was Ema the one who came up with it. As I recall, we were all sitting at McDonald’s, straight out of the studio, when he blurred it out. But then again, a name is just a name - what matters the most is the concept behind it, and the concept has always been there, among the three of us. So, what is Isla?
Isla is “la isla”, an island of solitude, our island of solitude. More specifically, Isla is the desire to bring our listeners on a journey to our desert island, to share our loneliness, so that in a way we can all feel less alone. I like to call it a window into our madness.
Our lonely Isla is made of beautiful rocky shores, glassy waves and a landfill of plastic and fishing nets on the east side, brought in by the current and the tropical winds. And as the world revolves around the sun, when the evening sets on the west side, the sky bleeds all the lights out and the stars rise up from the horizon, you almost get shivers.
How does your new sound differ from the music you previously made?
In the desire to be dirty.
We have all been previously playing in some other band and I think it is safe to say that all of those projects shared a common feature: being kitsch, which means ignoring the “dirt”, playing by the rules. With Isla it’s the exact opposite. We worship the dirt, as broadly as the concept can be defined.
We praise everything that is wrong, but nonetheless human. So, if in one of our songs we mention a bomb exploding in Beirut as nothing but an opportunity to talk about something in the evening, well that would be considered such a bad thing to say. An entire city got destroyed, tons of people died, but in a way it is true: for us in Milan that bomb was nothing more than a newspaper article to talk about at night over a beer. And it is pretty sad, but true. Dirty and true.
Tell us a story about you three.
Well, the way we met is a pretty cool story. This is how it happened: Adri and I were in a band and we were playing around the clock in Milan’s main squares. You could say that watching us was great fun - Adri bled his fingers out on the guitar each and every time the funky jam started and I destroyed tons of str