March 2022 - Music

Album of the Month - Circles by Leon

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.

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”).

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. 

All this closeness results in an elegant mix of up tempo 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.