Inside ‘Weeping Angel’, iyla channels grief into a bold debut, ‘Pledge’ leads, with intimate storytelling across 13 tracks.
‘Weeping Angel’ introduces iyla’s first full length canvas, and it reads like a diary lifted into widescreen. The 13 track debut, out now on all platforms, draws a line from heartbreak to revelation, weaving spiritual, sensual, and cinematic threads into her most realized work yet. Along the way, listeners meet the familiar ‘Wild’, ‘Strut’, ‘Overboard’, and ‘Corset’, and encounter a new focal point, ‘Pledge’.
“‘Pledge’ is a sexy and confident demand for a man to step his game up,” says iyla of the new track. “Drop to your knees or fly away forever.”
The album’s foundation is a personal one. In the wake of her mother’s passing, iyla found language and sound for a season marked by pain and change. Her own description frames the project as both testimony and transformation, a set of songs that rose from laughter and screams alike, and resurfaced from tears to the light. 
“Weeping Angel is my debut album, named after the monster that is love,” iyla reveals. “We created this album in the most challenging and transformative couple years of my life. It’s a reflection of everything I felt but couldn’t say out loud… it’s freedom, sensuality, heartache, pain, moments of clarity, grief and the spectrum that is to love and be loved in return. These songs came from laughs and from screams. This album was drowned in tears and brought back to the surface again to see the sun. Creating this project was a way of surviving, of making art from the wreckage, and discovering new parts of myself through it all. Weeping Angel is spiritual, provocative, and a ride you will never want to get off of.”
As for the sound, ‘Ave Maria’ bridges the sacred and the sensual, supported by her observation, “If you’re spiritual, there’s often an expectation you can’t embrace your own sexuality,” she notes. ‘Cotton Candy Clouds’ paints a pink dreamscape in honor of her mother, “Her favorite color was pink, and my favorite color was never pink. Since her death, my favorite color is now pink,” iyla shares. The heartbeat of ‘Twin Flame’ wrestles with duality, ‘Join Hands’ elevates a church like atmosphere, and ‘Skirt Hurt (Redemption)’ introduces defiant elegance, “It’s the first track I wrote after my mom’s passing,” she says. “I always need to have this stance of bad-bitch energy—but conveyed in a poetic and timeless way.”
In the lead up, ‘Corset’ amplified anticipation, a cinematic slow burn produced by longtime collaborator Kadis. Its vivid metaphors and tension animate a bond that constricts, while the Justin Moser directed visual, with iyla as creative director, breathes the ‘Weeping Angel’ artwork into haunting motion.
