credit Taryn Segal
After years of disappearing into other people’s characters, Sophia Anne Caruso puts her own interior world at the center of her debut album. On ON ECSTATIC, hyperpop maximalism, ecstatic dance, Y2K futures, reconstructive memory and falling deeply in love become part of the same experiment: how do you remain completely open to being alive when feeling everything also means risking everything?
Sophia Anne Caruso knows how to disappear.
Actors are supposed to.
Give her the clothes.
The language.
The mythology.
The world.
She’ll find somewhere inside it to live.
For years, that has been part of the way audiences have understood Caruso: through characters with lives already waiting for her to enter them. She originated Lydia Deetz in Broadway’s Beetlejuice. Later came Sophie in Netflix’s The School for Good and Evil.
But when she began constructing her debut full-length album, ON ECSTATIC, there was one fairly terrifying difference.
“There was nowhere to hide.”
No character between Caruso and the material.
No script.
No fictional psychology to dissect when somebody asked what a feeling meant.
She could create an aesthetic around herself—and she certainly did—but eventually she still had to stand in the middle of it.
“I could create all the mythology and visual language I wanted,” she tells MUNDANE, “but ultimately I had to be the thing at the center of it.”
That vulnerability is what makes ON ECSTATIC interesting.
Because sonically, this isn’t exactly an album interested in shrinking.
Electronic maximalism.
Hyperpop.
Distortion.
Euphoria.
Cool-toned Y2K futurism.
Sounds large enough to make emotions feel architectural.
Yet underneath all of that digital excess is an album concerned with remarkably elemental things.
Love.
Memory.
Grief.
Joy.
Connection.
Loss.
And the terrifying decision to remain open to all of them.
“I’m Ecstatic, I’m in Love”
The album began, appropriately, with movement.
Years before making the record, Caruso encountered ecstatic dance while traveling.
The practice removes many of the structures we usually place around dancing. Movement becomes less about performing correctly and more about allowing the body to respond before the conscious mind has time to supervise.
The experience stayed somewhere inside her.
Years later, during a session, Caruso kept repeating a phrase:
“I’m ecstatic, I’m in love.”
Something clicked.
Those words eventually became the opening lyrics of the album.
But “ecstatic” gradually grew beyond a reference to dance.
It became a philosophy.
For Caruso, the ecstatic state means remaining intensely receptive to experience—not merely the pleasurable parts.
Love, yes.
Beauty.
Connection.
Joy.
But also grief.
Pain.
Loss.
Impermanence.
Because you don’t really get to choose vulnerability à la carte.
Open yourself fully to love and you simultaneously create the possibility of losing it.
Allow yourself to experience joy intensely enough and you become conscious of how temporary it might be.
To remain ecstatic, in Caruso’s formulation, is to refuse to solve that contradiction by becoming numb.
“Feelings need somewhere to go,” she says.
Grief moves through the body.
Love moves people toward one another.
Music makes bodies move before the rational brain can demand an explanation.
“There is something alchemical about allowing an experience to pass completely through you rather than trying to stop it, numb it or intellectualize your way out of it.”
That idea eventually becomes the album’s destination.
The final track is called “love thru it.”
There is no shortcut around being alive.
So move through it.
Feel through it.
Dance through it.
Love through it.
When the Feeling Gets Bigger, Make the Sound Bigger
The first door into this world is “Higher State.”
It’s a love song.
But not a particularly small one.
Euphoric electronic production expands around Caruso’s intimate writing until a private emotion begins feeling almost physical.
That scale is deliberate.
Caruso doesn’t see electronic maximalism and emotional intimacy as competing impulses.
Quite the opposite.
“‘Higher State’ is about a private feeling becoming so expansive that it transcends the self, so I wanted the production to follow that same trajectory.”
The song begins close.
Then opens.
And opens.
Until production becomes an extension of what the lyric is experiencing.
“The maximalism isn’t there to decorate the emotion,” she says. “It’s an extension of it.”
It’s an important distinction for understanding ON ECSTATIC.
Caruso isn’t interested in hyperpop because she wants emotional writing dressed in futuristic clothes.
The sound itself participates in the emotion.
If the feeling is enormous, why shouldn’t the production be enormous too?
Love Is Something You Do
The phrase “higher state” became the point where the song’s philosophy crystallized.
Caruso began thinking about love not as a passive emotion but as movement beyond the boundaries of the self.
Not losing individuality.
Not dissolving into another person.
But interrupting the assumption that any of us exists completely alone.
That concept becomes particularly literal because Sky Lakota-Lynch, Caruso’s partner, appears on the track.
She wrote “Higher State” as an offering to him.
Then he entered the recording.
The song changed.
“I’ve always dreamed of making art with the person I love.”
What began as something directed toward Sky became reciprocal once his voice joined hers.
And suddenly the recording process itself began behaving like the relationship Caruso was trying to describe.
Listening.
Responding.
Leaving space.
Being close without disappearing.
“Making music together requires listening, responding and making space for another person/collaborator without disappearing yourself,” she explains. “In a way, that’s my philosophy of love too.”
The collaboration didn’t simply illustrate the song.
It enacted it.
Caruso wrote the melodies and words, but hearing Sky put his voice inside them became her favorite part.
“So romantic.”
Sometimes the theory really is that simple.
credit Taylor Tupy
Bring the Pop Into the Hyper
Hyperpop has frequently been associated with rupture.
Distortion.
Artificiality.
Digital excess.
Identity fragmentation.
Irony.
ON ECSTATIC borrows from that vocabulary while reaching for something almost unfashionably sincere.
Caruso isn’t particularly interested in treating hyperpop as a fixed genre in the first place.
It’s a color.
One among many.
“I love distortion, extremity and electronic maximalism, but irony isn’t the only thing those sounds can carry.”
Instead, she asks what happens when those extremes are used in service of sincerity.
Producer Kaje describes their approach as trying to “bring the pop into the hyper.”
Traditional pop songwriting remains underneath.
The technology expands it.
For Caruso, though, the innovation was almost incidental.
Her intention was simpler.
Use the sound emotionally.
“I think for us the innovative/evolution aspect was just a result of that.”
That’s probably why “songwriter-driven hyperpop” is a useful description of the record.
Not because songwriting and production exist in separate categories.
Because the feeling gets to decide what happens next.
Genre Is a Tool, Not a Boundary
“I am a songwriter unlimited by genre.”
That may be the cleanest manifesto Caruso offers for the record.
Sometimes a song begins with lyrics.
Sometimes melody.
Sometimes production unlocks everything.
Sometimes those processes become so entangled that separating “writing” from “producing” becomes meaningless.
But one thing always arrives first.
A feeling.
“The sentiment dictates the sound, not the other way around.”
One track on ON ECSTATIC, “like i like u,” began with only a short piece of sound.
Caruso heard it and immediately saw a world.
Children playing.
Trees from childhood.
Two people nervous to hold hands.
The physical, almost ridiculous excitement of young love.
Those images became the song’s emotional logic.
This is where Caruso’s background in performance and world-building reappears in a different form.
She hears ten seconds of production and begins seeing scenes.
But this time there is no character somebody else wrote waiting at the center.
She has to decide what the images mean.
Remember When the Future Looked Like This?
Visually, ON ECSTATIC looks backward in order to imagine forward.
Its world draws heavily from Y2K and ’90s futurism—the cool, sleek optimism of an era imagining what technology might eventually allow humanity to become.
The interesting part, of course, is that we now live in that future.
And it doesn’t look quite like the brochure.
Caruso is fascinated by what she calls “the nostalgia of an imagined future.”
There was optimism embedded in that earlier aesthetic.
Technology would connect us.
Information would become accessible.
The future would be clean and fluid and interconnected.
Now we can look backward at what the past thought we would become while standing inside what actually happened.
That gap fascinates Caruso.
ON ECSTATIC borrows imagery from the future we imagined while asking how to remain hopeful and human inside the future we received.
And then, somehow, we get to video-game water.
Memory Blue
Track four is called “memory blue.”
Its conceptual origin is wonderfully specific.
Caruso started thinking about how water changed in video games.
Early digital water looked obviously artificial.
As technology improved, developers became increasingly capable of simulating reflection, transparency, movement and light.
The copy became more convincing.
At the same time, Caruso was interested in the neuroscience of reconstructive memory: the idea that remembering something isn’t simply retrieving a perfect recording stored inside the brain.
Memory is reconstructed.
Altered.
Repeated remembering can mean remembering previous versions of the memory as much as the original event.
Suddenly video-game water and human nostalgia began belonging to the same thought.
An artificial representation becomes increasingly convincing until the copy starts feeling almost real.
Or perhaps becomes a nostalgic experience in its own right.
“A very fun concept for a catchy song,” Caruso jokes.
That’s ON ECSTATIC in miniature.
A pop song can apparently begin with fake water and end somewhere near the instability of human memory.
Why not?
The Machines Aren’t the Enemy
There is an obvious contradiction sitting inside an album obsessed with human connection while speaking through deeply technological music.
Caruso is interested in it.
But she doesn’t arrive at the predictable conclusion that technology is destroying humanity.
“I’m fascinated by the contradiction that we have more tools for connection than ever, yet so many of them allow us to experience one another only at a distance.”
That distance matters.
But electronic music also complicates the argument.
Machines create the sound.
Then that sound brings hundreds or thousands of physical bodies into the same room.
They dance.
Sweat.
Touch.
Move together.
Something technologically constructed produces something intensely physical.
“Electronic music itself is proof of that: something made through machines can bring a room full of people into an incredibly physical, communal experience.”
The question therefore isn’t whether technology is human or inhuman.
It’s what we do with it.
Caruso is interested in “the moment when technology stops distancing us from experience and becomes a vehicle back into it.”
That might also explain why ecstatic dance became such an appropriate conceptual foundation.
The computer makes the sound.
The body finishes the sentence.
There Is No Character Between Her and You
For someone with Caruso’s acting history, world-building comes naturally.
That’s still true here.
There are visual codes.
Colors.
Mythology.
Aesthetic references.
A carefully constructed sonic environment.
But ON ECSTATIC fundamentally changes the relationship between Caruso and the world she has constructed.
This time she isn’t entering it.
It came from her.
“There was no character between me and the material.”
Strangely, that absence became freeing.
She wasn’t responsible for understanding somebody else’s psychology.
She could be indulgent.
Follow a feeling simply because it belonged to her.
There were moments when she wondered why anyone would care.
Why should strangers want access to what Sophia Anne Caruso thinks about love?
Or memory?
Or grief?
Or video-game water?
The difficult part wasn’t necessarily making it.
“The vulnerability is in releasing it.”
Once the album leaves her, the private world stops being exclusively private.
Other people interpret it.
Misinterpret it.
Attach themselves to it.
See themselves inside something she made from herself.
And Caruso can’t control what happens next.
She doesn’t particularly want to.
A World From My Voice
Ask what she wants listeners to understand about Sophia Anne Caruso the musician after hearing ON ECSTATIC, and she recognizes the temptation immediately.
“This is such a tempting question to answer with a plea!”
Of course it is.
Please understand me correctly.
Please see what I intended.
Please don’t reduce me to the roles you’ve already seen.
Please listen to the album and discover the correct version of me.
But Caruso ultimately resists giving the audience instructions.
“We all would love to be understood at the end of the day, but I’m not sure I want to decide what people should understand about me from it.”
Releasing the album requires surrendering that control too.
She hopes people encounter something honest.
Something unmistakably hers.
What they make from it belongs to them.
That’s where she sees fandom entering the equation: people aren’t simply observing a finished identity. They become participants in the world surrounding the work.
And that makes ON ECSTATIC fundamentally different from the worlds audiences previously watched Caruso inhabit.
“For the first time on this scale, they’re responding to a world from my voice rather than one I was invited into.”
Maybe that’s the real higher state.
Not finally being understood.
Not constructing the perfect version of yourself.
Not disappearing into somebody else’s story.
Remaining open enough to make something deeply yours—and then open enough to let other people have their own experience of it.
No hiding.
No numbing.
No intellectualizing your way around the dangerous parts.
Feel through it.
Move through it.
Dance through it.
Love through it.
Stay permeable.
In Conversation With Sophia Anne Caruso
MUNDANE: ON ECSTATIC takes its name and inspiration from ecstatic dance, where movement becomes a way of getting outside your conscious mind. What did that practice unlock in you creatively, and how did you translate something so physical into songwriting and production?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: Way before making this record, while traveling, I’d been to an ecstatic dance party. But it wasn’t until a session years later, when I kept saying, “I’m ecstatic, I’m in love!” that something clicked. Those words later became the opening lyrics of the album.
Over time, ECSTATIC developed into a philosophy of its own: a state of being acutely receptive to experience. To love, memory, beauty, connection and joy, but equally to grief, pain, loss and impermanence. I was interested in interpreting the idea that you can’t really open yourself to one without risking the other.
Movement is a metaphor for how I wanted to live inside that contradiction. Feelings need somewhere to go. Grief moves through the body, love moves us toward one another, music makes us move without asking our conscious mind for permission.
There is something alchemical about allowing an experience to pass completely through you rather than trying to stop it, numb it or intellectualize your way out of it.
The record ends with “love thru it,” which is where that philosophy finally arrives: there is no way around the difficult parts of being alive. You have to move through them. Feel through them. Dance through them. Love through them.
For me, ON ECSTATIC is the choice to stay vivid and permeable to life even when closing yourself off might feel like the only way.
MUNDANE: “Higher State” introduces the album through this huge, euphoric electronic landscape, but the songwriting underneath it is remarkably intimate. How did you find the balance between hyperpop’s maximalism and making sure the emotional core of the song never disappeared beneath the production?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: I never really saw the production and intimacy as opposing forces. “Higher State” is about a private feeling becoming so expansive that it transcends the self, so I wanted the production to follow that same trajectory.
It begins intimately and then keeps opening outward until the feeling becomes almost physical. The maximalism isn’t there to decorate the emotion; it’s an extension of it.
MUNDANE: You describe love in “Higher State” as something that can move us beyond the “illusion of aloneness.” That’s a striking idea. Was there a particular lyric, melody or musical moment where that concept first crystallized for you?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: I think it crystallized in the phrase “higher state” itself. I was thinking about love as something active, a movement beyond the boundaries of the self.
Not that love erases individuality, but that it can interrupt the illusion that we exist entirely on our own.
That’s also why this dance music felt so right. The feeling becomes movement, and love becomes something you do.
MUNDANE: Sky Lakota-Lynch appears on “Higher State” not only as a collaborator but as your partner. What happens musically when the person you’re writing about—or experiencing these emotions alongside—actually enters the recording itself?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: I’ve always dreamed of making art with the person I love. I wrote “Higher State” as an offering to Sky, but once his voice entered the song, it became reciprocal.
Making music together requires listening, responding and making space for another person or collaborator without disappearing yourself. In a way, that’s my philosophy of love too.
The collaboration became an enactment of what the song was trying to say. I did write the melodies and the words, but getting him in to lay down vocals was my favorite part. So romantic.
MUNDANE: Hyperpop can sometimes be associated with fragmentation, distortion, irony and digital overload, while ON ECSTATIC seems interested in hope, connection, memory and sincerity. Were you consciously interested in using that sonic vocabulary to communicate something unusually earnest?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: Definitely, although I’m less interested in hyperpop as a fixed genre than as one color in a larger palette.
I love distortion, extremity and electronic maximalism, but irony isn’t the only thing those sounds can carry. I was interested in using that intensity in service of sincerity. If the feeling is enormous, sometimes the sound should be enormous too.
Kaje and I were both interested in bringing the pop into the hyper, and in his words the genre presented us an opportunity “to lean into the most modern production styles while staying true to pop songwriting roots. This combination allows for the best parts of each to shine through in what we feel is an evolution of where the genre can head toward in the future.”
I agree with him on this, but I have to say, on a less technical note, that my intention was simply to use it with emotion. I think for us the innovative/evolution aspect was just a result of that.
MUNDANE: The album is described as “songwriter-driven hyperpop.” What does that distinction mean to you? When you build a song, does it begin with lyrics and melody and then become electronically transformed, or can production itself become part of the writing process?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: It means the sentiment dictates the sound, not the other way around. I am a songwriter unlimited by genre.
Sometimes I come in with lyrics and melody, sometimes a sound unlocks the entire song, and sometimes production and writing happen so simultaneously that I couldn’t tell you where one ends and the other begins.
What I will always come in with, though, is a feeling.
The production is part of the composition and genre is a tool for me, not a boundary. I’m interested in whatever sonic language most vividly expresses what the sentiment or feeling is.
Some of these songs started with ten seconds of a beat or simple sound I heard that I then conceptualized around how they made me feel.
When I first heard the starter that became “like i like u,” I heard children playing. I smelled the trees from my childhood. In my mind I saw two people nervous to hold each other’s hands, and I felt that bubbly excitement of young love in my stomach.
These feelings and visions became the emotional logic of the song.
MUNDANE: The visual world begins with cool tones and ’90s futurism, which feels particularly interesting because the future imagined in the ’90s looks very different from the one we actually inhabit. What attracted you to that aesthetic, and how does it connect to the album’s ideas about hope and interconnectedness?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: I was very inspired by the nostalgia of an imagined future. Y2K futurism had this particular optimism about technology, connection and what the world might become, and there’s something poignant about looking at that vision from inside the future that actually arrived.
ON ECSTATIC has moments that live in that tension. It borrows from the future we once imagined while asking how we remain hopeful, connected and fully human in the one we actually got.
Track four, “memory blue,” was totally inspired by the change that happened in video-game water quality. I was fascinated by the neuroscience of reconstructive memory, the idea that remembering isn’t accessing a perfect recording of an experience, but just an altered copy of it.
In a way, we’re remembering the memory as much as the original event.
That became connected in my head to the evolution of water in video games, watching an artificial representation become more and more convincing until the copy begins to feel almost as real as the thing itself, or perhaps its own nostalgic experience.
A very fun concept for a catchy song…
MUNDANE: You’ve spent much of your career inhabiting characters with incredibly defined worlds, from Lydia Deetz to Sophie in The School for Good and Evil. When you began making your first full-length record, did you approach world-building instinctively in the same way, or did you have to unlearn some of that theatricality to arrive at something more personally revealing?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: World-building is probably instinctive for me at this point, as it’s part of acting, but the difference was that there was nowhere to hide.
There was no character between me and the material. I could create all the mythology and visual language I wanted, but ultimately I had to be the thing at the center of it.
Strangely, that made the record very freeing to create. I was only concerned with expressing myself, not dissecting a character. It felt indulgent at times. I wondered why anybody would be interested in hearing what I have to say or feel.
The vulnerability is in releasing it, when something that belonged entirely to my interior world becomes available for other people to interpret.
MUNDANE: There’s an interesting contradiction in making an album about human connection through a musical language that is deeply intertwined with technology. Does ON ECSTATIC explore that tension between our increasingly digital lives and the very human desire to feel physically and emotionally connected to one another?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: Absolutely. I’m fascinated by the contradiction that we have more tools for connection than ever, yet so many of them allow us to experience one another only at a distance.
I don’t think technology is inherently alienating, though, and I do not think my sentiment is anti-technology at all.
Electronic music itself is proof of that: something made through machines can bring a room full of people into an incredibly physical, communal experience.
A lot of the album lives in that tension, between mediation and presence, synthetic and human.
I’m interested in the moment when technology stops distancing us from experience and becomes a vehicle back into it.
MUNDANE: After being known publicly for characters you’ve played, ON ECSTATIC puts your own name, writing, voice and inner world at the center. When people finish this album, what do you hope they understand about Sophia Anne Caruso the musician that they couldn’t have learned from watching you perform someone else’s story?
SOPHIA ANNE CARUSO: This is such a tempting question to answer with a plea!
We all would love to be understood at the end of the day, but I’m not sure I want to decide what people should understand about me from it. Part of releasing the record is giving up that control.
I hope they feel that they’ve encountered something honest and distinctly mine, that they can be a part of. I think that is where fandoms come in.
But what they make of me, or how it resonates, belongs to them.
What excites me is that, for the first time on this scale, they’re responding to a world from my voice rather than one I was invited into.
