Simone Ledoux

Simone Ledoux makes the kind of synth-pop that's a little too sincere to be cool — which is exactly why people love it. Big bright choruses, gated drums, a saxophone that shouldn't work and does: euphoric dance songs you can cry to, about crushes and wanting and the ache of a good night ending.

She's from Mile End, in Montréal, and she writes and sings in French and English, sometimes in the same breath, and treats that as ordinary rather than a selling point. She started alone in a bedroom with a cheap keyboard and a laptop, posting songs that were unfashionably earnest — no irony, no cool distance, just enormous feelings at full volume — and a small, devoted following found her and stayed.

She isn't a powerhouse and doesn't try to be. The feeling is huge; the voice is bright and close and warm, more best-friend-in-your-ear than diva on a mountaintop, with the little cracks left in. That's the whole trick: she means it, completely, and she'll embarrass herself to prove it. The songs sound like a party and read like a diary — a chorus you sing in the shower over a verse that wrecks you.

She's the first artist on Afterglow, and the first place that told her the earnestness was the point, not the thing to fix. Cute, stylish, funny about everything except the feelings, which she takes entirely seriously. She'd rather write something you sing than something you applaud.

Il y en a une en français. Elle ne la traduira pas.