A Review of NMDA x Isabelle Rose’s New Collaboration - ‘Stoned’
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
There are collaborations that emerge from creative convenience and there are those that feel genuinely necessary, where the combination of two artists produces something that neither could have made alone and that addresses material requiring exactly the resources both bring.
NMDA: Spotify, Instagram, Apple Music
‘Stoned’, the new single from multi-instrumentalist producer NMDA and vocalist and songwriter Isabelle Rose, is unambiguously the second kind: an electrosoul release that fuses gospel intensity, electronic production and raw emotional storytelling in service of subject matter that demands both sonic power and lyrical courage.
NMDA’s trajectory from guitarist and saxophonist performing across punk rock and jam fusion scenes to self-taught producer working across chillhop, downtempo, ambient, funk, soul and electrofunk gives his production a breadth and physical grounding that purely electronic backgrounds sometimes lack. The influences he cites, FKJ, Gramatik, Lettuce, GRiZ and Emancipator, sketch the range of a producer who understands groove as an emotional as much as rhythmic phenomenon, and ‘Stoned’ deploys that understanding in service of its most demanding material yet.
Isabelle Rose, whose vocal training spans jazz and classical foundations alongside influences including Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Susan Tedeschi and Joss Stone, brings a commanding presence to the track that the subject matter requires and fully warrants. Her performances blend gospel grit, vintage soul energy and emotional intensity, and on ‘Stoned’ she delivers what both artists describe as one of her most powerful lyrical and vocal performances to date: autobiographical material informed by her lived experience as a survivor of sexual abuse, channelled into a composition that addresses cycles of trauma and accountability from multiple perspectives simultaneously.
The track’s willingness to broaden its lens to include both survivor and perpetrator, exploring the psychological prisons formed by unresolved trauma and inherited behavioural cycles without presenting a singular comfortable viewpoint, gives it an emotional and moral complexity that is genuinely rare in popular music. The cinematic, electrosoul production gives that complexity the sonic scale it demands: this is music that holds difficult truths without simplifying them.
An uncompromising and deeply human collaboration that pushes well beyond genre into something genuinely significant!
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