I’ve been called a slut for wanting what I want. A whore for taking it. A bitch for not apologizing afterward. Some guy with a bruised ego has handed me every label in the guy’s handbook on how to handle difficult girls at one point or another, because I loved too much or partied too hard or ended up tangled in the wrong sheets by midnight. And yeah I did all of it. I did it consciously and I’d do it again this weekend without blinking. The guilt trip never came because I never sent it an invitation. At some point I stopped defending myself and started wearing the labels instead. You want to call me an immoral bitch? Good. I put it on a t-shirt and answered the door in it. Whatever the world had an opinion about, I filed it in the trash where it belongs. That’s the frequency Isabella Han-Bolelli is broadcasting on ‘Immoral Bitch,’ and she turned it into the angsty pop declaration I didn’t know I’d been waiting for.
The production is unapologetically pop with a raw, declarative backbone. People have compared Isabella’s voice to Ellie Goulding and LP. On this track you hear exactly why. She delivers with an ease that pulls you in without announcing itself, somewhere between Goulding’s coiled power and LP’s down-home twang. There’s real heat in how she carries a damn line.
The opening verses don’t waste a second. “I won’t apologize / for loving myself / loving my body / loving my life” arrives like someone walking into a room already mid-conversation. Then the second verse follows with “I won’t apologize / for knowing myself, / knowing my body / speaking my mind.” She’s stacking self-knowledge the way you’d state facts on a resume. No explanation required. Confident as hell and completely unbothered by who’s taking notes.
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Then she turns and addresses whoever’s been making it weird. “Don’t take your problems out on me / we all have insecurity / but don’t take yours out on me.” She acknowledges that everyone’s carrying something, fine, but she draws the line hard right there. Your damage is yours. The sweetness in her delivery is what does the most work here. She’s almost gentle about it which is somehow far more devastating than if she’d just screamed. That shit cuts.
The chorus is where the whole thing becomes a statement. “You know, who knows / maybe I am an immoral bitch / Oh I know, I know / but sweetie we have already been over this / I know, we all know / it’s kind of funny you don’t / I’m an immoral bitch.” She absorbed the label and made it fucking hers. “Sweetie we have already been over this” is the most devastating line on this track. The patience in that tone. The eye roll you can practically hear. She’s been ahead of this conversation the whole time, smiling about it.
Later the track pulls you somewhere quieter, more intimate. “I won’t apologize, / know how to smile / fluent in laughter / and falling apart” followed by “I won’t apologize, / sitting alone / smilin’ to myself / this singing is mine.” “Fluent in falling apart” is doing serious work. She’s owning the full experience, the joy and the mess, completely and without reservation. Then she closes with “this singing is mine,” a quiet declaration of ownership. Whatever the world has an opinion about, her voice stays hers. That’s the most seductive thing on this whole fucking record.
Isabella Han-Bolelli is 16 years old and already has the insight of a woman who’s lived through some shit. She was born to a Chinese mother and an Italian father in a family of writers and that’s a deadly combination for a young artist. Pop industry? You’ve been warned. She lost her mother in infancy and has been using music to carry the stories her mother left behind. She started singing at five because, her words, she “didn’t know how to be quiet.” Her sound moves through pop, soul, indie, and R&B, and writing, she says, is “my way of processing everything.” The fact that she’s doing this at 16 with this level of clarity is a lot to sit with.
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Isabella says she wrote this “for every girl and woman who’s been told that she is too much or not enough. That her confidence is off-putting. That her ambition is threatening. I hope this song reminds them that they are that bitch and they don’t need anyone’s permission to love themselves.” That quote covers a lot of ground and I want to read it out loud in every room I’ve ever been dismissed in. Whatever she healed with that line, she meant to.
Eye to Eye’s criminally underplayed new wave track ‘Nice Girls’ was calling out the same pearl-clutching machinery back in 1982, asking what’s gonna happen if she “spends her life all pristine, like a proper nice girl,” shaming society for “nipping girls in the bud” before they could even get started. Four decades later Isabella is still having to make the same damn argument. The machinery hasn’t changed. The girls have.
The outro seals it. “baby / don’t blame me / i’m young and in love with life / Hell, call me Sinful / if it pleases you / I’m gonna stay / young & in love with life.” “Hell, call me Sinful” is the best line on this record. She’s extending the invitation. Pile on another label. She’s collecting them. She’s staying young and in love with life regardless of whatever vocabulary people reach for to describe her existence, and she’s doing it with a smile that could level a room. Hedonism as resistance. Pleasure as a whole damn point of view.
I walked out of this review wearing the same labels I walked in with. Still here. Still not filing a single fucking apology about it. Isabella figured this out at 16 and made a whole track about it. The rest of us are just catching up.
