Léonie Pernet

Working as a multi-instrumentalist collaborator, arranger, and scorer of films, French artist Léonie Pernet crafts an artistic take on tense synth pop through her solo projects. A decade spent in supporting capacities preceded her first full-length solo album, the 2018 release Crave, whose tracks—like her earlier output—blended structured songs with instrumental sections under her characteristically flat vocal style.

Club nights became her focus while she pursued studies in liturgical music at university, where she honed an ability to weave poetic and sociopolitical elements into her selections. Early in the 2010s she performed on percussion during tours with French DJ Yuksek, after which she relocated to Brooklyn, New York, and began posting original material online in 2012. Those initial recordings, among them selections from the 2014 Two of Us EP issued by Kill the DJ, incorporated stacked vocal samples alongside piano and electronic keyboard figures set against live rock drumming. Her first feature-length film score accompanied the immigrant-focused drama Bébé Tigre in 2014, with the short film Shamanic Killer appearing two years afterward. Through this work she shifted toward a more cinematic sensibility in her indie electronic music, a direction that shaped her self-produced debut LP. InFiné, the Parisian label, issued the worldly Crave in September 2018.