Lenka

After stepping away from her position as vocalist and keyboardist with Australia's Decoder Ring, songwriter Lenka Kripac moved to Los Angeles and started shaping her own eclectic, atmospheric pop songs under just her first name. Drawing inspiration from figures such as Jem and Björk, she set her breathy vocals against backdrops built from electronic drumbeats, horns, and twinkling piano. A onetime child actor who had trained with Cate Blanchett, she infused her performances with theatrical flair, prompting Epic Records to sign her to its roster near the end of 2007. She headed east to lay down her first album in Woodstock, New York, where visitors including Howie Day and Missy Higgins contributed brief appearances. Eventually she made her home in Los Angeles again, performing regularly at the cozy Hotel Café ahead of the September 2008 release of her self-titled debut, Lenka.

Lead single “The Show” reached the Top 40 across multiple territories, among them the U.K., Switzerland, and Poland, where it attained the top spot. Around the same time Lenka became engaged to visual artist James Gulliver Hancock, who later created several of her music videos, and devoted much of the next year to worldwide touring. That engagement supplied prominent themes for her sophomore effort, Two, a set of pop tunes and winsome love songs issued in early 2011. She resurfaced in 2013 with the orchestral pop album Shadows on Skipalong Records, a project sparked by the arrival of her son. Two years later came her fourth full-length, The Bright Side, which spotlighted the single “Blue Skies.” Her fifth album, Attune, followed in 2017. Self-produced and more organic than earlier work, it contained the song “Heal,” co-written with fellow Australian singer/songwriter Sally Seltmann.