LÉON LÉON

"I need to take off my hoops!" teases Swedish singer-songwriter Lotta Lindgren, who performs as LÉON, with a laugh.

The 24-year-old recently returned to her homeland (and, she excitedly notes, her dog) after spending two months in Los Angeles working on her self-titled debut album, set for release in 2019 on her own LÉON Recordings imprint, in partnership with BMG.

After dropping the album’s gushing first single “Baby Don’t Talk” in 2018, three years to the date since she made her official debut with the finger-wagging “Tired of Talking” after it went unexpectedly viral on SoundCloud, she has followed up with three EPs worth of husky soul-pop love songs - "Treasure" (2015), "For You" (2017) and "Surround Me" (2017) - while “Tired of Talking” has surpassed 64 million Spotify streams.

Still, LÉON remembers a time when she’d get excited over 50 new followers on her Facebook page. Growing up in Stockholm to a family of musicians and artists, and inspired by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder and Lauryn Hill, she began writing songs in elementary school and joined her first band at age 14. “My sister would be talking of, ‘I’m thinking of doing this [career] instead,’” Lindgren remembers. “And my mom and dad would be like, ‘Are you sure you’re not going to do music?’”.

Around the time she turned 20, she narrowed her work down to eight demos and started going by LÉON, a Nordic name she liked because it sounded androgynous. But when her emails to several labels went unanswered, she decided on a whim to upload “Tired of Talking” to SoundCloud in 2015. The next day, “I had, like, 20 new people following me on Instagram, and I was like, ‘Oh shit!’” she remembers. “But then I saw the numbers growing” on SoundCloud, where streams quickly reached hundreds of thousands. Twitter shout-outs from Katy Perry and Chloë Grace Moretz only added to the momentum, and she signed with Columbia Records for her first EP.

Now, as she preps her full-length debut (and approaches her 25th birthday), Lindgren is applying the same sharp lyricism to the realities of growing up. The LP will include a track about coming to terms with no longer being a teenager and love songs that touch for the first time on her own role in heartbreak. “I’ve gone looking inside myself more, like, ‘What are the reasons why you ended up in these situations?’” It’s one of the many things Lindgren says has changed about herself since she first began going by LÉON. Another: “Listening to my gut.” Another, with a laugh: “Growing some balls!”.

“When I came to America for the first time, I’d just ended school and was figuring out where I wanted to go. The years between 20 to 25 are really weird because you’re trying to figure out yourself,” she says. "I think I’m coming to terms with who I am.”.

01 Lost Time
02 Falling
03 Hope is a Heartache
04 Come Home to Me
05 Baby Don't Talk
06 Better in the Dark
07 Cruel to Care (Voice Memo)
08 Pink
09 What You Said
10 You and I