***ALBUM OF THE MONTH | March 2022***
LÉON
Circles
BMG/LÉON Recordings
Listen Below
Intimacy is the currency that Swedish singer-songwriter LÉON (née Lotta Lindgren) spends freely in her third full-length album, Circles. On her diverse 2019 self-titled debut, she let us in a bit with piano ballads “What You Said” and “Come Home To Me,” along with “Cruel To Care”—a surprisingly candid voice memo (voice demo?) recorded on her bed while she was in the midst of a hangover, a spell of self-doubt, and apparently a broken heart.
For her 2020 sophomore collection, a more sonically cohesive break-up album appropriately titled Apart, LÉON revealed more of herself with a revelatory song cycle that uncovered an increasingly sensitive and soulful side to her as an artist than what was presented a year earlier on her debut.
Apart presented a big step forward in terms of artistic vulnerability, partly as a result of collaborating on the album with her friend—Stockholm producer / songwriter Martin Stilling—instead of Los Angeles production teams like she did on 2019’s LÉON. Compared to that album, Apart felt incredibly authentic, the production was more lush, the lyrics more pointed, the vibe way more personal.
The songs on Circles reap from the familiar and fertile ground of LÉON and Apart—the highs and lows of good and bad relationships. But on Circles, LÉON opens up and divulges even more within the album’s compositions. With Stilling back as a main trusted creative partner along with a handful of other co-writers and producers, confidential emotions within the lyrics are buoyed with rich sonic arrangements reminiscent of warm sunsets (“Lift You Up”), luminescent dawns (“The Beach”) and blinking neon lights that promise release…or reinvention (“Soaked”).
Many of the songs drop into nostalgic moments that feel like they’ve been kept secret until now. Like in the gentle ballad “Fade Into A Dream” (co-written with Stilling) while a lone acoustic guitar dances with gauzy percussive synth beats, LÉON recalls the geography that surrounds the excitement of falling quickly for someone new ("Late nights in a parking lot / Tell me all the secrets that you keep / Underneath the overpass / I'm afraid I'm falling in too deep.")
Or in album highlight “All My Heroes” (written by Moa Michaeli), it’s a thrilling late night encounter with a bad boy (“I know he's bringing me down / But I feel so alive / With his hands in my denim,") where realizations about lack of self-control are softly sung with blooming choral background vocals washing over them with gentle absolution ("All my heroes are dead / And I don’t believe in God / Who will save me from myself?")
Throughout Circles, there’s a refined intimacy in the production of LÉON’s vocals as well. During most of the performances, her weighty and honey-colored voice is gently accented with soft, cottony reverb that backlights her delivery so that it feels like you’re the only one to which she’s singing.
Like on the acoustic guitar-led “Moonlight” (also co-written with Stilling), another album highlight, as she sings about feeling alone in a romantic relationship ("Blue eyes on my right side / Oh I love you but I still feel so alone”). The sadness and confusion underlying her wistful delivery is magnified by not only the soft-edges of reverb, but also the spaciousness of the arrangement that lets each lyric line seep into the song’s aural atmosphere like watercolor paint falling into paper fibers.
All this closeness results in an elegant mix of uptempo and balladic love songs that float in their own time and space—carefully constructed out of vulnerable diaristic examinations of self and unbeholden to today’s confining parameters of what constitutes a pop song for the charts. With Circles’ increasingly unguarded personal storytelling and rich emotive production, LÉON takes another elegant step into crafting a long and memorable career.
Notable Tracks: “All My Heroes” | “The Beach” | “Fade Into A Dream” | “Moonlight” | “Soaked”
LISTEN: