SOMA Finds Resilience In The Face Of Trauma On Her New Mixtape ‘COBRA’

Trauma often finds its ways to creep up on you during the vigorous process of healing. If not a continuous nag at the back of your mind, all-consuming of any thought, it speaks through your body, riddled within your cautious movements and dictating the eggshells you walk on. For Eora-based singer and rapper SOMA, trauma isn’t a life-defining shield that exists to hide her vulnerability – it’s a catalyst for empathy, understanding and evidently, shattering art. 

Her forthcoming debut mixtape COBRA exemplifies this to the fullest. It's not ashamed, volatile or fearful, but earnest, diligent and heartfelt. COBRA is a sonic depiction of strength when face-to-face with life or death situations. Outside of this, it’s a slick, 12-track modern iteration of hip hop, enriched by powerful storytelling, guided by a dominating voice that shows no compromise.

When we meet via Zoom, the duality of SOMA is even more apparent. Kind, bright-eyed and eager, it’s made clearer than ever that the narrative of COBRA could only be told through the penmanship of someone whose aura fills the digital-room with softness and harmony. It takes an indestructible force like SOMA to be able to curate a project like COBRA, and we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Over Zoom, we chat about the lifetime of the mixtape and the creative collaboration that brought it all together.

What is your fondest or earliest music memory?

 I think the array of records that were always around our house growing up. My Mum is Indian and Portuguese, and my Dad's Australian, so they both brought such an eclectic style and genre of music to my life. I remember my mum cooking amazing South Indian curries whilst listening to this beautiful music from around the world,and classical and The Doors, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, all of the greats. I think a lot of those records and songs and artists are so nostalgic to me, especially with the smell of delicious food being cooked. Those are some good memories.

That's beautiful. Do you feel like you attach music now to moments like that in your current life?

Yeah, definitely. You can make it your own little movie that you're living in.

How did you translate all that music that you're taking in as a kid, into your own thirst for wanting to be a musician and start writing and creating music?

I think as well as records lying around, there were a lot of instruments lying around. My mum plays piano and guitar. We had a sitar and tumblas and so many different instruments lying around. So as a child, I picked them all up. My parents kind of saw I had a natural aptitude, I guess, with timing and pitch. So they got me into piano lessons at four or five, and then my piano teacher was like, you've got a really good voice, I think you should sing and I already kind of was anyway just dancing and singing around the place. And then I kind of took it more seriously as I was growing up. I knew that that's what I wanted to do. And then in my early teens, I was like, I need to buy the Native Instruments machine and start making beats, which was so fun. It was such an easy resource as well to get ideas down and create. From there, I just couldn't really stop. I started to perform and do gigs and stuff when I was 18 around the inner-west. And then, here I am finally finishing a mixtape body of work.

How long has COBRA been in the works? How many years of your life does this project kind of encapsulate?

It's about a lot of my younger years growing up in different types of environments in Sydney – some rough, some beautiful and uplifting. It's just a correlation of life experiences, ups and downs, the highs and the lows. Working with Daniel Duke, he's amazing, it took us four eight hour sessions over a few weeks, which was pretty quick. But some of these ideas had been with me for a few years, maybe even some of them from the beginning of life. So it's nice to get them all out. It's very cathartic.

Just listening to the project, you dive into a lot of really raw things, a lot of things that  people kind of hesitate to explore or touch on. So has that vulnerability always been innate to your writing style or your storytelling style when it comes to music?

I think it always has been. I definitely haven't delved into the more, deeper kind of stuff until now, which was nice. My producer was like, just go there. If you want to go there, you don't have to play it safe all the time and constantly be writing about loss of love and things like that. You can go deep, because it's all open, it's not offending anybody. So this is the deepest project that I've done.

How's it feel to be able to separate it from yourself and put it out for everyone else to listen to, and detach it from yourself and be like, here you can have it, take what you will from it. How does that feel?

It feels really good to put it out into the world, it's also quite nerve wracking. It's scary and exciting and people will say what they say and like what they like, but it is good. It feels like a chapter of my life that's kind of done now, and I can move on a little bit.

Something that I noticed listening through the mixtape is that there's this repeated sentiment of "Blood spilt, knives heavy, and the tables have turned". Tell me about that line and how it kind of pops up at different points within the mixtape. I just want to kind of know the significance of it to you.

It's about one of the most traumatic experiences in my life that I almost died from. I was just caught in a really bad situation, wrong place, wrong time. An area I was growing up in was quite rough as well. And as a young teen, I think you just kind of don't realise the environments you find yourself in sometimes, and how dangerous it can be. And so it's a reminder. I'm okay, and I wouldn't take away what happened to me, and I'm going to use it to my advantage and become an empathetic person. And try to understand why people do the things that they do, I have the capability to just put it into my art. So it's just a little reminder of what happened and how I've kind of  navigated life and turned my life around because it could have gone either way.

Definitely, thank you for sharing that with me. With that being said, how do you hope COBRA and the stories within it resonate with people? What do you want listeners to take away from the project?

Honestly, whatever they would like to take away from it. I think a lot of the musicality is really beautiful throughout. There's some spoken word poetry, there's some heavy rap. I think that there's a lot of different feelings in there. So there's some pretty gung-ho, "I don't really care", empowering type songs. And then there's also some laidback, reminiscent and meditative type songs, a little bit of everything. I don't know, I just hope that they gain some sort of feeling or emotion that can heal, or make them feel empowered.

There's a 20-minute long form video that'll come out with the release of the mixtape. Tell me about how that whole thing came together and how it visually correlates to the project.

For a very long time I wanted to make a body of work that represents me and my sound and all the genre-melding things that I tend to do. I wanted to accompany it with a long form video and make a story. And so working with Frederick McHenry from Atlanta whose Melbourne-based now, he's an incredible creative who took this project on which I was so thankful for. He helped me distinguish the vision. So we worked together on it, and then I flew down to Melbourne and filmed it within three days. So that was crazy. There was a lot of work, so I commend him for that, and the whole team, beautiful team. But yeah, we kind of spoke about what each song meant, and we didn't want it to be too obvious. So there's a lot of metaphors in there. It's just a beautiful visual story.

Do you have a favourite part of the process?

All of it was incredible. I think the most enjoyable thing was creating and collaborating with other creatives for me. Walking into the studio that was booked and seeing the incredible team that came together and was willing to work with us on this project, and really, genuinely believed in this project. I met so many new people. It just manifested to be this thing that really worked. And energy wise, it clicked. Everything flowed very naturally. Although it was definitely hard work, I think everybody had a good time, and now I'll know them all forever, and we'll create again. Another person I worked with as well for the last song of the mixtape, Adam Scarf, an incredible videographer as well. We made the last song, 247.

Tell me about the live shows coming up and being able to kind of bring COBRA into this live setting and communicate it to a live audience. How are you feeling about that?

I'm so excited. The show is on the 7th of March at Trocadero Room, which will be the COBRA mixtape launch. All new material that I haven't performed to anybody yet. I think a lot of people haven't even heard much of it, except for the songs that I've released. So that's very exciting. I want it to be quite an intimate space, because it is such a story that I'll be telling. I think I know what to expect, but I still don't. So it's a new journey for me too.

And then to close, what can we expect from you as we venture further into 2025 post-COBRA release, what's next?

I'm already starting to finish off some other singles to come out after COBRA. We're planning an East Coast tour. We've got some dates for Melbourne as well. I'm going to be flying down quite often to collaborate with some creatives there, pretty much just writing, content, performances, and trying to enjoy it all and have a good time and not let the industry stress me out too much.

COBRA, a mixtape by SOMA will release on all streaming platforms on Friday, February 21st. Tickets to her upcoming shows can be found here.