Lights

Canadian singer/songwriter Lights crafts buoyant, atmospheric electronic synth pop that first registered on domestic charts in May 2008 via the debut single “Drive My Soul,” opening the door for her initial full-length, 2009’s The Listening. Recognition arrived swiftly with the 2009 Juno Award for New Artist of the Year. Subsequent releases sustained both critical and commercial momentum: Siberia in 2011 and Little Machines in 2014 each entered the Canadian Top Five while claiming Pop Album of the Year honors at the Juno Awards. Expanding her palette, Lights has issued acoustic counterparts to her studio albums, paired a graphic novel with the 2017 release Skin & Earth, and ventured into instrumental territory on 2020’s How to Sleep When You’re on Fire. Her 2022 Fueled by Ramen debut, Pep, arrived with a confident, pop/rock stance, while 2023’s dEd inverted her customary acoustic companion format in favor of a densely electronic approach.

Born Valerie Poxleitner in Timmins, Ontario, in 1987, Lights traveled extensively during childhood with her missionary parents. Her father introduced her to guitar, and she started composing original material early, occasionally drawing lyrical inspiration from biblical verses. At eighteen she turned professional, writing songs for Sony/ATV Music Publishing before performing live and signing with Toronto’s punk imprint Underground Operations. An American alliance with Doghouse Records followed, leading to the April 2008 release of her self-titled Lights EP; several tracks received steady airplay on Canadian radio and MuchMusic’s video countdown.

The next year brought further visibility when she captured the Juno Award for New Artist of the Year and joined that summer’s Warped Tour while finishing her debut album, The Listening, which appeared in October 2009. The set reached number seven on the Canadian albums chart and later earned gold certification. In 2011 she returned with Siberia, a more mature and sonically refined effort co-produced by Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh of the Toronto electronic collective Holy Fuck. Two years afterward came Siberia Acoustic, offering stripped-down reinterpretations of the original material.

Lights issued her third studio album, Little Machines, in 2014. Recorded during her first pregnancy with husband Beau Bokan, frontman of blessthefall, the record emphasized melodic yet still electronic textures; it debuted at number five in Canada and received the 2015 Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year. As before, she followed it with an acoustic companion, Midnight Machines.

Skin & Earth, her fourth studio album, surfaced in 2017 and featured the singles “Giants” and “Savage,” the latter including a guest appearance by Twenty One Pilots drummer Josh Dun. Conceived as a multimedia project set in a post-apocalyptic world, the record was released alongside a comic book scripted and illustrated by Lights herself. June 2020 brought the instrumental synthwave album How to Sleep When You’re on Fire, with all proceeds directed toward the Black Lives Matter movement.

Pep marked Lights’ 2022 debut on Fueled by Ramen and reflected an assured, feminist perspective within a more assertive, rock-inflected sound; the album climbed to number 32 on the Canadian chart and number 25 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales tally. July 2023 saw the standalone collaboration “Human Being” with Arkells. That May she released dEd, a counterpart to Pep that reversed the original track order and recast the songs in a richly atmospheric electronic style.