Cate Le Bon

Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon shaped a shadowy, atmospheric strain of psychedelic pop through her singular vocal delivery and inventive production choices, evident across a string of acclaimed solo releases, joint efforts, and studio work for other performers. Although her early output carried occasional folk traces, wiry guitar lines tended to dominate, shifting into increasingly warped and unsettling territory. After settling in Los Angeles, she unveiled Mug Museum in 2013, an album that showcased some of her most lucid and compelling songwriting alongside a Perfume Genius appearance. Beyond maintaining her own trajectory with releases such as Crab Day in 2016, Reward in 2019, and Pompeii in 2022, Le Bon joined Tim Presley, another purveyor of off-kilter pop, in the DRINKS project and served as producer for indie figures including Eleanor Friedberger and Deerhunter.

Cate Le Bon spent her formative years in Carmarthenshire, a rural area of West Wales. During a 2007 U.K. tour she supported Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, an artist with whom she later worked on occasion. That year she also issued her debut single, “No One Can Drag Me Down”/“Disappear,” on her own and completed the album Pet Deaths, which remained unreleased. Peski put out the Welsh-language EP Edrych yn Llygaid Ceffyl Benthyg in 2008, the same year she supplied vocals for “I Lust U” on the Neon Neon album Stainless Style by Rhys and Bryan Hollon. Her first widely available full-length, Me Oh My, appeared on Rhys’ Irony Bored imprint in 2009 and drew early praise from Uncut. Sophomore effort Cyrk, which merged Nico’s eerie, folk-inflected tone with the experimental Nuggets-meets-Krautrock thrust of Os Mutantes and Faust, surfaced in early 2012.

Le Bon’s third album, the well-received Mug Museum, documented her relocation to Los Angeles in 2013 and included Perfume Genius on the track “I Think I Knew.” The move to the States aligned with a rise in prominent collaborations; soon afterward she contributed to sessions by Kevin Morby, Manic Street Preachers, and Willis Earl Beal while forming DRINKS with White Fence’s Tim Presley. The duo issued their debut, Hermits on Holiday, in 2015. Le Bon’s fourth album, Crab Day, arrived in early 2016, prompting an extensive tour with a five-piece band. Rock Pool, a four-song EP, followed in 2017, and DRINKS returned with Hippo Lite in April 2018.

Alongside her own ongoing recordings, Le Bon maintained an active role as collaborator and producer, helming projects by Alex Dingley, H. Hawkline, and Josiah Steinbrick, remixing Eleanor Friedberger’s 2018 song “Are We Good?,” and contributing substantially to Deerhunter’s seventh studio album, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, issued in January 2019. Fifth solo album Reward appeared in May 2019, cut with longtime associates such as Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa and guitarists Josh Klinghoffer and Huw Evans. The record turned toward more personal themes than Le Bon’s typically elusive earlier material. Late that year she and Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox released the collaborative EP Myths 004 as part of Mexican Summer’s Myths series; the two largely tracked the wily, experimental set in Marfa, Texas, while attending a festival. In 2021 Le Bon released the nervy single “Running Away,” the opening track from sixth album Pompeii. Recorded through remote exchanges with several musicians from the Reward sessions—including Mozgawa once more on drums and Stephen Black supplying saxophone—the February 2022 release pushed her abstract pop sensibility into still more distant realms.