Sophia Mengrosso’s new album, “Unforgiven”, doesn’t so much start as it does detonate, a thirteen-song treatise on survival. Her voice, a thing clearly trained for gilded halls and velvet curtains, instead wails from within a foundry’s clang and fire. The result is a bizarre and beautiful collision, the sonic equivalent of discovering a lost Caravaggio painting lit by a flickering fluorescent tube in a derelict subway station. The sacred and the profane aren’t just in dialogue; they’re locked in a brutal cage match for the soul of the song.
We follow a narrator through the psychological labyrinth of a controlling relationship, a space where another’s will becomes the air you breathe. The lyrics narrate the slow poisoning of the self—being drowned, haunted, medicated into a hollowed-out compliance. There’s a clinical numbness to some moments that feels far more chilling than any theatrical scream. This isn’t the sound of a heart breaking; it’s the sound of a mind methodically, maliciously, being taken apart piece by piece.
But this is no simple lament. The abyss, it turns out, has an echo. The album’s central miracle is how the anguish begins to curdle into something else entirely: defiance. Mengrosso’s operatic cries shift from pleas to war horns, and the guitars carve out a path from the wreckage. This is the sound of wings, once burned to stumps, being regrown from scar tissue and pure, unadulterated will. It’s less a story of recovery and more one of reclamation.
“Unforgiven” leaves you with a profound and slightly unsettling question. After escaping a cage, is freedom the goal, or is it learning how to wield the bars as your new armor?
