Stories of slumbering tape machines and rediscovered freedom, of the difficulties of ambivalence and human relationships, all packaged in well-crafted, intriguing indie-pop: Leyya’s new album “Half Asleep” has all the magic of a new debut album.
Nine years ago, singer/guitarist Sophie Lindinger and producer Marco Kleebauer released the single “Superego” under the name Leyya. The song had a completely new, individual sound: the vocals, the distorted beats, the sinuous basslines, that subzero attitude coupled with a surprisingly warm sound – at the time, it was unique, and it didn’t go unnoticed. They won the FM4 Award in 2017; two years later, they accepted the Amadeus Award for best alternative act.
Meanwhile, the internal pressure to continue sounding new and innovative was building while touring, release plans, social media, and considerations of public image were all taking their toll. Self-presentation doesn’t come naturally to these two sensitive musicians; they prefer to maintain a distance, working in communion with their inner selves. Three years ago, Sophie and Marco announced that they would be taking a break from playing live. There were rumors that they were breaking up. But now, with Half Asleep, they’ve released an album that led them back to their beginnings.
Marco Kleebauer: “After we moved to Vienna and established ourselves a little bit, we didn’t want to lose it. We felt like we had to create that good sound again, just a little different. For a while, we were looking around too much to see what’s cool and trendy; we invested much too much time in making something that we ended up tossing out in the end. Now, I think we’ve come back to our starting point, that we can really make music from inside ourselves. We can ask ourselves what kind of music we’d like to listen to. Exactly what we did at the beginning, because we didn’t know any better.”
Maybe that’s why the first single sounds so fresh. It’s a wild mix of drum’n’bass-style hyperbeats, a characteristically deep-rooted bassline, and Sophie’s brooding vocals. This time, though, there’s a touch of Aphex Twin-like vocal playfulness and the repeated sample “even the drugs don’t work”.
Space for experimentation
Producing the album was a long process. In 2019, Leyya was already working on material that they hoped would lead to an album, but it didn’t work out. The flow needed to bring their ideas to life refused to come, blockaded by their punishing touring schedule. So they took a break…and then, last year, they met again in Marco’s studio.
Sophie Lindinger: “We had no expectations, partially because no one was expecting anything of us. We had told everyone we were taking a break, and we didn’t tell anyone we were making music again. It was so liberating, to make music just because we wanted to – without the feeling that something had to come out of it. And in the end, a lot came out of it.” (laughs)
Marco Kleebauer: “In 2023, we took a week to work in the studio. And all of a sudden, we were able to finish songs again. It feels like all the work had put into music that will never be released was essential to get to this point, that we had the mindset to finish the music: the sound aesthetic and the feelings that the lyrics should evoke.”
Leyya used that space – both in the studio and in their heads – to experiment. Not looking for new artists on Spotify, pulling inspiration from them to fuel their own material: this time, they were entirely in the moment. They experimented with instruments, analog tape machines, took inspiration from spontaneous sketches and sounds.
For instance, “Nobody Cares, Lovely” grew out of messing around on a drum machine that spit out amusing synth sounds instead of beats. The delicate song is about the feeling that everyone’s looking at you, the fear of doing something wrong – until you realize that everyone else is just as preoccupied with themselves, not paying attention to you. Thus, as Sophie puts it: “we should all take time to chill now and then.”
This playful approach also allowed Leyya to use old material from their archive. The single “Pumped Up High” is based on an audio sample from 2017, created in Marco’s dignified apartment in Vienna’s Eighth District. It was a recording of an instrument meant to imitate a saxophone; sent through a guitar amp, it didn’t sound like a guitar anymore…but it sounded interesting. And then, just in the spot where a lot of pop songs turn to a minor chord, Leyya inserted a major chord – according to Marco, reminiscent of the French electronic duo Justice. The song gives you the feeling of being at a wild party – but more as an observer than a participant, enjoying the view from outside.
Half-asleep tape machines
Half Asleep speaks of a condition that – with serial crises and ever-accelerating change – has become all too familiar. Sometimes it’s a survival mechanism that allows us to distance ourselves, to better cope with suffering. The danger, however, is that we become separated from our feelings, our needs, our visions, our wishes.
Sophie Lindinger: “It also has to do with being available all the time, constantly thinking about a thousand things. Sometimes, we decide to sleepwalk through things because it’s all too much. It makes us forget to pay attention to what’s beautiful and worth living for in the present.”
Marco Kleebauer: “We stuck with ‘half asleep’ because it’s such an ambivalent term; it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The album plays a lot with ambivalence, on many different levels: analog and digital, noise and not-noise. Noise itself is very ambivalent – a sound with a lot of noise in it can be unsettling, but noise can also be something that makes people relax. ‘Noise’ contains all frequencies, so it’s often the most disruptive kind of signal – but it also contains everything that music can contain.”
That may all sound a little philosophical, but it appears on the album as entirely concrete miniatures, with titles beginning with “BASF” – recordings from a little magnetic tape machine that allows the user to modulate recorded sounds. They can then, in turn, be manipulated digitally, which leads to a certain ambivalence – conditions that seemingly cannot coexist. Like sleeping and waking, or past and future.
Sophie Lindinger: “The tapes are really old, and the magnets don’t work as well anymore, so a lot of times, traces of old recordings are left on the tapes. They bleed through, or are still audible in the background – you record something onto the tape, and the tape itself plays with you.”
As a whole, the album is a sort of introspective sound collage of ambivalent feelings, each with its own niche – a broad, multifaceted aural and musical experience. One further highlight is the heartwarming, acoustic-flavored “I’m Around, I’m Around” – a song that manages to bundle all of the uncertainty of modern life into a beautiful, fascinating moment.
Video: Leyya – I’m Around I’m Around
Andreas Gstettner-Brugger, translated and adapted from the German original by Philip Yaeger.