About LEILA

To take over a hall, create a surreal, celebratory vibe and empower the audience with her fearlessness, all Leila needs is her singing voice. The multilingual Bern native has become the mouthpiece of a bicultural, diverse, emotionally aware generation of young people within just a few months and without any major rock star poses.

The 23-year-old's songs combine pop appeal with radical naivety and a stubborn aesthetic of disorder. Between tender guitar ballads, yearning electronica surfaces and angry garage house passages, Leila mostly unfolds her artistic perfection in moments of absolute closeness. Leila doesn't sugarcoat things, she mostly draws and transmits her energy while looking into the abyss. When she writes a text, it is usually about negative feelings, dark fantasies and oppressive realities - about struggling and falling, about being an outsider and lost, about justified anger, unsatisfied longing and the hope that arises from it.

Leila draws her self-confident and self-reflective attitude, on and off stage, from the rejection of social norms, from mental and emotional dead ends, from grueling "gun to my head" moments. On a lyrical level, the Bernese does not shy away from even the most grueling of topics. Her song "Abused" - wrapped in a deceptively casual, almost reggae-esque sound structure - tells of the traumatic experience of sexualized violence that countless female-identified people experience in the course of their lives.

Leila's piece "Love the Game" is about a toxic relationship with a notorious liar: "I don't wanna fall into your arms, knowing they can only do me harm" - not a fictional story, you can tell. Paradoxically, the artistic self-regulation that is typical for Leila often results in almost unintentional hymns that could hardly hit the nerve of our time better. Leila has - without seriously aiming for hits, having studied music or being able to read music - undoubtedly a talent for great melodies and rousing song structures.

Her dramaturgies live from playing with contrasts, from refreshing unplannedness, from breaks and anti-cyclical roughness, from sharp blues cords in pixelated bedroom pop garb, from the clash between powerful clarity and washed-out fluidity. In the cosmos of Leila, comfortably warm indie guitars glide into harsh, pounding techno beats; Pig organs arrange themselves with strings and dark noises; supporting drum tracks burst into the action unconventionally late. Here, cinematic soundscapes sound almost three-dimensional in their breadth, there Leila exploits the silence almost excessively, there her emphatic singing fades away in stubbornly timed art pop phases.

Speaking of singing: Leila's voice - including her idiosyncratic way of using it with maximum flexibility - is recognizable among thousands. Whether Leila whispers or roars in a Riot Grrrl-esque manner, blossoms in powerful vocal arches or experiments with minimalist vocal effects: at all times there is a subliminal bass line that combines fragility, serenity and extension. Leila writes exclusively English-language lyrics - and performs them with a subtly defiant accent that at times brings to mind Tove Lo, Fever Ray and Dolores O'Riordan. Artists like these have had a lasting impact on Leila's understanding of music. Born in Bern in 2001, she is a child of the noughties. While records by Queen, Pink Floyd and Amy Winehouse were playing in her parents' living room, Leila developed a deep connection to the music of Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus at a young age. At first glance, it may hardly fit with the alternative gesture that Leila lets shine through in her art, but to this day she is an avowed fan of noughties and tenies pop.

Leila is by no means too cool to express this obsession - she reacted quite emotionally when Paris Hilton started following her on TikTok or Billie Eilish recently added her to her close Instagram friends. Back to the CV: Leila - real name Leila Šurkovic - is the daughter of a Swiss art historian and a painter from Sarajevo who ended up in Bern as a result of the Yugoslavian war. LEILA owes her understanding of art, her cosmopolitanism and, to a certain extent, her multilingualism to her family. As a Swiss German, English, High German, French and Bosnian speaker and an artist with a noticeably international sound, Leila is the figurehead of a new bicultural generation.

She wrote her first English song lyrics at the age of twelve, and in her youth she was active as a guitarist in various school bands. With the help of her guitar, the first serious track sketches, which Leila recorded on her cell phone in the basement of her parents' house, later grew. Leila posted the mature solo piece "Irrational" on the Internet on her own in January 2021 - in her hometown of Bern, this very first song already sparked a small lockdown hype. In collaboration with Nemo Mettler - yes, that's right, Eurovision Song Contest and all that - Leila's biggest single to date, "Gun To My Head", was created immediately afterwards, and has been streamed millions of times. The piece went viral throughout the German-speaking world without any professional support, catapulting Leila into numerous playlists and the regular line-up of the Swiss pop band Jeans for Jesus. As part of the band shows, she gained experience playing the guitar on big stages, and in the Jeans for Jesus sets she played her early solo songs in front of a large audience for the first time.

After completing her training as a graphic designer, Leila signed with the indie label Grönland Records, run by Herbert Grönemeyer, in the summer of 2023. A few months later, her seven-part debut "Burnout" was released - a compact bundle of all the songs released to date, which promptly promoted LEILA to the "NewcomerTo Watch 2024" list curated by Amazon Music.

© Alex Barbian