Léonie Pernet

Also a multi-instrumentalist sidewoman, arranger, and film composer, French musician Léonie Pernet puts an artful spin on anxious synth pop as a solo artist. After a decade of working in other roles, she made her full-length solo debut with 2018′s Crave. Like prior tracks, it was marked by Pernet’s deadpan vocal delivery in a mix of structured song and instrumental passages. Pernet began organizing club nights while studying liturgical music at university, and developed a flair for combining poetry and sociopolitical consciousness in her mixes. In the early 2010s, Pernet toured as percussionist for French DJ Yuksek before moving to Brooklyn, New York and beginning to share her own music online in 2012. Early tracks, including those on the Two of Us EP, released on the Kill the DJ label in 2014, featured layered vocal samples and various piano and electronic keyboard motifs with live rock drums. She made her feature-length film-scoring debut with the immigrant-themed drama Bébé Tigre in 2014. The short film Shamanic Killer followed two years later. In the process, Pernet began to take a more cinematic approach to her indie electronic music, as reflected on her self-produced debut LP. The cosmopolitan Crave arrived via Parisian label InFiné in September 2018. ~ Marcy Donelson