Leikeli47: "Shape Up"
[RCA, 2022]
The music industry loves a gimmick: some quirk—aesthetic, biographical, musical—by which an artist can easily be remembered. Leikeli47’s gimmick, you might say, is that she always wears a bandana or balaclava when she appears in public. The pixelated face on the cover of this album, her fourth, is another iteration of her commitment to anonymity. It certainly works well as a publicity device and even more certainly gives critics something to write about.
But what critics seem to have missed is that Leikeli is currently trialling an anti-gimmick: she has disabled her Instagram and Twitter accounts and let her website go defunct. That’s right— Leikeli47, an artist whose name sounds suspiciously like a Hotmail email address, is actually a rare example of a contemporary artist without an official internet presence. To be fair, she did use social media to promote her previous record Acrylic [RCA, 2018], and you can still access her songs on Bandcamp and her videos on YouTube. But still, I was pretty thrilled when I clicked on a link to her website and the page just came up blank.
I was also relieved that I could skip over the usual marketing materials and focus on her music. Ultimately this is what Leikeli claims the mask is for anyway: to first and foremost be heard, not seen. Diminishing her online presence is perhaps just a further encouragement to listen—but it’s not like you’ll need it. Shape Up is an album that wins you over by sheer catchiness. Nothing on the album appears overthought or overworked, the average track length is just over three minutes, and some of the best songs on the album are the simplest. “LL Cool J” gets along fine with six simple sounds—a kick drum, a rim-shot, a hi-hat, a cymbal, a bell, a repeated bass line—and the vocal hooks are only made sharper by the absence of clutter.
Bashful and unassuming in interviews, Leikeli calls this album “the confidence I’ve been praying for”. It’s a confidence she’s able to convincingly flex throughout the album while still retaining a sense of cheekiness. On “Zoom”, a song about protecting oneself physically, sexually, and romantically, she raps:
I ain’t the type of bitch to do a lotta barking
And only thing I need validated is my parking
I’m from the backstreet boy where it’s very rare we link
And if you sing the wrong note, we'll put your ass *NSYNC
It helps that Leikeli has the ability to sing or rap these lines with equal facility. This already puts her in a rare category of hip-hop artists (Lauryn Hill, André 3000, who else?), but it’s here more than on previous releases that she uses this versatility to breathe space into her music and create a winning sonic arc through the middle of the album. The shifts in energy also keep you guessing where things are going next. To give you some idea: “Carry Anne” would be on point for Nicki Minaj, while “Baseball” is a better Solange song than anything on When I Get Home [Columbia, 2019]. But now imagine Solange opening her next album with “Back up again in this motherfucker / Entertainment for you motherfuckers” or Minaj softening up to jazzy piano loops—both ridiculous prospects, gimmicks even. Until you hear Shape Up.