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Inside the Nightlife Fueled World of Ella Rosa’s 'Under The Thumb'
Step inside Ella Rosa’s after midnight world as the London born LA based artist unpacks pressure nightlife and release on her forthcoming project From Under The Thumb.
- By: Julianne Elise Beffa / Photography By: Gus Frank
By the time Ella Rosa’s music makes sense, it is already late. The kind of late where the city feels quieter but heavier, where club doors open and emotions stop pretending they are manageable. This is where From Under The Thumb lives. In that charged space between wanting to disconnect and needing to feel everything all at once.
Looking back, Ella traces the beginning of the album to a moment that felt collective and inescapable. When Trump was elected president, she remembers an emotional shift that settled in overnight. There was shock, numbness, anger, and a strange dark humor in the air. “I felt a kind of collective pressure settle in overnight,” she told LOOP Mag in an exclusive interview. That weight became impossible to ignore.
What followed was a dissonance she could not shake. “I wanted to scream, dance, disconnect, and stay hyper aware all at once,” Ella explains. Without realizing it at first, that tension started seeping into everything she was writing. From Under The Thumb grew out of that feeling. Not as a reactionary statement, but as a way to process the loss of certainty and find release in noise rather than pretending it was not happening.
Pressure is the emotional core of the album. Internal, external, imagined. Ella describes it as the most vulnerable and chaotic project she has made. Each song came from a different emotional landing point, which is why the record feels intentionally scattered. It mirrors contradiction. Falling in and out of control. Chasing comfort. Learning what it means to let go.
Sonically, From Under The Thumb moves fluidly between UK garage, experimental pop, opera, and early 2000s energy. That club leaning sound was shaped directly by Ella’s immersion in nightlife while making the project. She began DJing regularly and found herself drawn to faster tempos. “Every song I played was 126 BPM and higher,” she says. “I wanted to make songs that I could either DJ or mix into my sets.” With Anwar Sawyer executive producing and collaborators spanning the UK and LA underground, From Under The Thumb sounds exactly like the places it was born in. Late nights, crowded rooms, pressure in the air, release on the dance floor.
That instinct runs through the album, especially on “Ded,” the lead focus track that anchors the project. Built for late nights and dark rooms, the song feels engineered for movement. Ella imagines it living somewhere specific. “I would love this one to be listened to in headphones on a dark cold night on the way to a rave,” she says. “Cigarette in hand preferably.”
The world of From Under The Thumb is shaped by geography as much as emotion. Creatively, Ella moves between London and Los Angeles, absorbing the nightlife cultures of both cities. London nights pull her inward. “They feel darker and more immersive,” she explains. “The energy is more underground, which pushes me toward atmosphere, groove, and subtle evolution rather than immediate payoff.”
I would love this one to be listened to in headphones on a dark cold night on the way to a rave. Cigarette in hand preferably.
Los Angeles brings a different energy. “LA is brighter and more expressive, which gives me a more whimsical vibe in my writing,” she says. Moving between the two keeps her sound balanced. Grounded and textured from London, expansive and polished from LA. That tension, she says, is where her music really comes alive.
Another tension defines Ella’s sound. Her background in classical voice training sits in deliberate contrast with club driven production. Precision dropped directly into chaos. That contrast is intentional. “What excites me most is the tension between control and chaos,” she says. Classical music demands discipline and intention, while club spaces are unpredictable and physical. For Ella, that collision turns the club into a space where something refined and raw can coexist.
Tracks like “Weapon” and “District Line” lean into that confrontation. They are physical, addictive, and slightly unsettling. Ella writes with the body in mind first. “I’m always thinking about how a track feels in the body before I think about how it reads on paper,” she explains. The pull of the bass, the tension before a drop, the hypnotic effect of repetition. Those elements matter more than polish.
“Weapon and District Line both had the intention of making the listener move,” she says. “To feel slightly uncomfortable but irresistible at the same time.” Dancing, for Ella, is not just release. It is resistance.
I’m always thinking about how a track feels in the body before I think about how it reads on paper.
Nightlife itself becomes a mirror for the album’s emotional weight. These spaces feel freeing, but they also heighten everything. “I feel seen, judged, desired, and projected onto,” Ella says. Often all at once. That tension reflects the internal pressure she is writing about. The push between wanting to disappear and wanting to be fully expressed.
Being in those environments amplifies everything. Confidence and insecurity. Release and expectation. From Under The Thumb lives in that moment of compression, where the external noise intensifies what is already happening internally.
In 2026, Ella will bring this world to life through live performances and DJ sets across Los Angeles, New York, London, and Berlin. Each format offers a different connection. “When I’m DJing, the connection is immediate,” she says. “I’m reading the crowd in real time and shaping the night based on vibes.”
Performing her own music feels different. More vulnerable. More intentional. “It feels like I’m inviting the room into a specific emotional world rather than adapting to it,” Ella explains. It is the side she prefers. The one that asks the audience to step fully inside the pressure with her.
At its core, From Under The Thumb is about cutting through numbness to feel something honest. “The album lives in that same space of urgency,” Ella says. “The need to access something real.” It is about stepping into intensity and letting it expose what has been suppressed.
This is Ella Rosa after midnight. Where pressure becomes motion, chaos becomes clarity, and the club becomes a place to feel something real.
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