A mausoleum can be a lonesome place — cool and lonely and sad. But in the parlance of Omo Cloud — a.k.a. Cole De La Isla — it’s also a monument to what has come before. A way of letting go — and the title of their debut album, out via Dusty Mars Records on June 27th.
The non-binary singer-songwriter grew up in San Diego, the child of two musicians, fed on a steady diet of Radiohead, Wilco, and David Bowie as they hung out in vocal booths and studios with the pair. Although they got their first guitar at 14, De La Isla was initially an actor; they left high school at 16 to move to L.A. and pursue that dream. But there was a pall over the profession for the teen, who says they were sexually abused by a leader of a Christian youth theater company as a child. “While I was never a true believer, this experience shattered my relationship to ‘faith’ of any kind,” they say. And this experience — along with the lack of control they felt in the acting world — led them to take control of their own creativity, feeding it, instead, into achingly gorgeous music that ruminates on everything from gender identity to religion to romantic love.
The result is Mausoleum, 11 celestially beautiful tracks that careen between sweet and sorrowful, produced, in part, with De La Isla’s long-time collaborator Andy Walsh. And, yes, although the songs are informed by De La Isla’s childhood trauma, they’re about more than that. They’re a reclamation — and a balm to anyone who has felt similarly lost. “It’s taken a really long time to get to a place where I feel like I have a voice again,” De La Isla says. “I also don’t want it to overly inform a listener. The music belongs to them.”
Today, Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the standout track “Ultimate Love,” a gloriously grunge-tinged take on what the titular emotion is — whether in the religious sense or the romantic. Reminiscent of acts ranging from Radiohead to Big Thief, the song is a poignant work of indie rock that showcases Cole De La Isla’s poignant vocal strength alongside flourishes of jagged guitar bursts and dreamy, choir-like background vocals.
Cole De La Isla describes the inspiration behind the song:
“Ultimate Love” is a song about chasing something that might not exist—the idea of a ‘perfect’, ‘unconditional’ love that feels more like a myth or fantasy. It came from a place of emotional disorientation, where I began questioning if what I was looking for was even meant for me. There’s a great dance between desire and doubt, between wanting to believe in something and realizing you might be fooling yourself.
There’s also quiet humor in the heartbreak, moments where sincerity tips into awkwardness. I think about how embarrassing it was in church settings as a child, pretending to feel the presence of God. So there’s a recurring sense of performance and artifice to highlight the masks we wear for comfort. There is no resolution, just someone who is trying to make peace with the absence of something they were once sure existed.
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