Stay Divine, Stay Dangerous

There are artists who make music. Then there are artists who are the music  who walk into a room and the frequency of the air shifts slightly, as if someone just turned up a very tasteful subwoofer. Léonie is decidedly the second kind. She grew up playing family jams in the living room with her father. She has written poems since she was small enough that her parents described her as "an old lady." She once stopped an entire crowd to announce she needed to dance to Michael Jackson and delivered. She is a Taurus. 

"My music is quite aerial and light. But then there's Liar. I can't even listen to Liar. I've done it maybe three times live." 

We sat down with her and what came out was a one-hour portrait of an artist who is simultaneously the most grounded and most ethereal person in any given room. An artist who references Blaksploitation cinema, Jorja Smith covers, Sex and the City, and Kendrick Lamar in the same breath, and somehow makes it all cohere into something called Divine Energy.

On the Origin of a Universe

Léonie's project is called Divine Energy. Her first single was Swag Energy. The energy theme was not, she admits, entirely conscious at first. It was just the only word that felt true.

Ask Léonie to describe her musical universe and she'll say "floating." Aerial. Light. She'll pause, then add that Liar and Best Mistake exist to complicate all of that  to give the lightness something to push against. "There are really metaphors," she says, almost apologetically, as if depth is something requiring a disclaimer. "It's more complicated than what you imagine through the lyrics."

Her breakthrough moment of artistic identity? The song and video for Best Mistake, directed by Bobby Afonso, a friend who's been there since the beginning. The clip crystallised something a visual language, an aesthetic anchor. "Best Mistake is really the song I'm most proud of," she says, and this is the sixth or seventh time she's said it across two interviews. She means it every time. "It allowed me to transcribe to the image what I felt and what I wanted to say through my music."

From there, the universe kept building. Focus clips shot in a single white studio room same context, radically different costumes: one outfit with yellow polka dots, a red scarf, small heels. Another in full leather with boots. The same Léonie in different frequencies. She thinks carefully about whether to give people full visual context or leave space for their own imagination. "It's a choice I make," she says, "because I think it's great to transcribe your music visually  but I also need to calm down on this, because it's cool to let people process the songs and imagine what they want."

"I felt divine. I have value. I count. And I stopped hiding. Fuck the rage. That's it."

The English Question 

Let's address the elephant or rather, the chanson  in the room. Léonie sings entirely in English. In France. In an industry that has historically had strong opinions about this. She has heard the question a thousand times. She has an answer, and it is not a defensive one.

"When I was growing up, I didn't have a representation of a Black singer, or a Black person in French music," she says, measured and clear. "So it was really in the States and UK and that's why we are so attached to this musical style and culture, because these are people we can identify with." Choosing English was not an accident or an aspiration to foreignness. It was identification. It was political. "Even if the industry is going to give me a hard time," she says, "I made that decision, because the musical industry is too formatted. You have to shock them."

There is a growing scene now  R&B, soul, hip-hop artists in France singing in English  and Léonie feels the effervescence. She helped create some of it. She is patient about the rest. "If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter. But at least you've done everything so that there are codes that break and evolve." This is Léonie's theory of art: it is inherently counter-cultural, inherently political, and pretending otherwise is, in her words, "counterproductive and counter-sensual."

"Art is political. Even if people don't want to hear it  it's despite these people. We have no choice. It's just like that."

The Stage, the Jam, and the Bubble

Before there was La Boule Noire  her sold-out Parisian show that attendees describe as "the safest I've ever felt at a concert," which is both a concert review and an indictment of the industry simultaneously there were jams. Every Sunday night. First at Les Disquaires, now at La Maze. The idea was spontaneity within structure: no full improvisation, but no rehearsals either. Just Léonie, musicians, covers, and whatever happens.

"It taught me to deal with stress on stage," she says, "to deal with all the things that can happen at the last minute, to communicate with musicians, to manage the group's cohesion." The jams were essentially an ongoing masterclass she designed for herself and then opened to the public. The musicians she met there are now professionals who work on her projects. The Sunday crowd became part of her community before her community had a name.

Concerts are where Léonie feels most at home  and most exposed. "You're a bit stuck in the real and the unreal," she says, searching for the right word. "You feel like you're in a kind of bubble. And when you manage to introduce all the people who are present into this bubble I find it so incredible and magical." The La Boule Noire show was that bubble at its largest. A room full of people who felt, somehow, that they had been personally invited.

Next Chapter: More Badass, More Funk, Possibly Leopard Print

COMING SOON

Léonie's next project is inspired by the Blaxploitation movement  big afros, latex, fur coats, leopard. Brighter colours: yellow, orange, purple. The vibes: "much more solar, much more affirmed."

The next project is coming. She won't give a full briefing, but she gives you enough to work with: it's inspired by the Blaxploitation movement of the 1970s, a cinematic and artistic moment she's been discovering more and more of herself in. "Women with big afros, latex outfits, big guns  fur, leopard," she says, and sounds genuinely thrilled. "It's really badass, really bad bitch." The colours have shifted from the red-bordeaux-and-black palette of Divine Energy to something brighter: yellow, orange, purple, blue.

On Vinyl, Representation, and Michael Jackson Impressions

When she received her first vinyl pressing, she was "completely overwhelmed." "I didn't really know how to react," she says. "There are my pieces on this physical object. It means that people will have this part of me in their home." She pauses. "A part of my person." For an artist who started from nothing  independent, girl-bossing her way through administrative nightmares with the help of a best friend who handles shooting and video production  the vinyl was a monument. Proof that something real had been built.

She danced before she sang. She sang before she recorded. She recorded before she pressed vinyl. She now organises jams, sells out venues, and is carefully, methodically, building a nation. The motto of Léonie Nation, should you wish to apply for citizenship: "Trust the process. Stay divine." The rules are minimal. The requirements are just that you believe as she does, sincerely, stubbornly  that everyone has something precious in them that is worth preserving.

✦   RAPID FIRE — LÉONIE IN HER OWN WORDS

LAST FILM LOVEDUn combat après l'autre — deeply, completely

FAVOURITE SERIES Sex and the City (Samantha, always Samantha) — also Desperate Housewives, currently on binge no. 3

DREAM COLLAB Isaiah Rashad. Also Smino. Drake "for some reason." Kendrick, obviously.

SONG ON REPEAT L'Heure des Crimes by Joe Mambo

FAVOURITE SPOT IN LONDON Blues Kitchen, Camden. No elaboration needed.

BEST PLACE IN PARIS Le Djoon (disco house). La Bellevilloise. Strasbourg-Saint-Denis quays in summer.

HER UNIVERSE AS A FILM Sex and the City. Also The Get Down. Both. Simultaneously.

THE ALBUM THAT CHANGED Jorja Smith's album Lost & Found and, for my childhood, Michael Jackson's album Thriller.

ASTROLOGICAL SIGNTaurus. ("Everything is calculated, everything is linked. The universe.")

ADVICE TO 8-YEAR-OLD LÉONIE"Go girl. Be yourself. Really."

Léonie is not an artist on the rise. She is an artist who has already arrived the industry just hasn't caught up yet. She is building, brick by brick, the kind of catalogue that outlasts trends, the kind of stage presence that people describe to their children, the kind of artistic integrity that makes other artists quietly reconsider their choices. 

Remember the name. The rest is just a matter of time.