Ears Wide Open: Golda

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Golda

* Updated with new artist name

Any one of the three new singles from Golda May (fka Golda*)— the solo project of singer-songwriter Ariella Golda Sosis — is capable of stopping you in your tracks. First, there is her voice: creamy, precise and resonant. Then there is the poise with which she sways from vulnerability to strength, exuding a wisdom beyond her years.

She is well-equipped to sound that way. Reared in Chicago and San Diego by Ukrainian parents who spoke nothing but Russian at home, she wrote her first song as a 7th-grader (and it was titled “Genocide in Darfur”), graduated high school at age 16 and had founded a nonprofit before she was out of her teens. The first Golda music appeared in 2015 when she was still studying business at UC Berkeley.

“I started taking songwriting more seriously in college when I began recording an EP after a school trip to India,” Golda says. “When I was 22, I worked as an assistant for a music manager who sort of ‘discovered’ me as a songwriter and started developing me, leading me to get really involved in the L.A. pop writing scene. I turned my attention to my own artist project after really missing writing songs that felt like me, like Golda.”

“Dear Los Angeles,” released today, is a frangible acoustic memorandum to the city that’s part love letter and part therapy session. It’s a change-of-pace from her previous two singles, “Under” and “Wish I Was Someone Else,” a pair of crisply produced alt-pop singles that revealed her skills as a confessionalist.

The artist’s “Golda” EP is due later this year.

||| Stream: “Dear Los Angeles,” “Under” and “Wish I Was Someone Else”