LEOPLD
LEO
PLD
Stockholm meets Manchester. Beirut meets Georgia. 80s synth with an oriental edge and stories worth hearing.
Tom Manchester, now Beirut
Stockholm and Manchester, Georgia and Beirut. LEOPLD make 80s-influenced electro-pop that tells stories and the best thing they've heard about their music is that a song about suicide made someone think it was about a relationship.
Show, don't tell. That was the lesson. LEOPLD learned it and ran with it.
LEOPLD are Jakob, originally from Stockholm, Sweden, and Tom, from Manchester, UK. Friends first, bandmates second. Jakob was already working with another band, The Vinegar Tears, when the two decided to make music together. The working relationship formed naturally: Jakob tends toward the music and production, Tom toward the lyrics and vocals. Two cities, two sensibilities, one sound.
They are now respectively based in Georgia and Beirut, which gives their practice an international dimension that goes beyond geography. Their latest single All Through Eternity features Lebanese vocalist Manel Mallat, mixing electronic rock-pop with an oriental sound that reflects Tom's five-plus years living in the Middle East. The collaboration sounds like both where they come from and where they are now.
Realising that people can interpret your lyrics in completely different ways. One song called 'The Edge' is about struggling with thoughts of suicide, although someone wrote us that they felt it reflected a relationship they were in. We like this though.
LEOPLD on the most interesting response to their music
That anecdote is also a manifesto. A good artist should show, not tell they were taught that at school, and LEOPLD has built their practice around it. The song about suicide and the song about a relationship are the same song. Both listeners are right. The music opens the space; what people bring to it is their own.
Tom likes to relay a story, an experience, an emotion in a vivid and sincere way. Jakob likes to build the architecture underneath it. Together the sound sits somewhere between the 80s records they grew up on and the places they now call home which means it sounds like nothing else, which is the point.
"We wanted to try something new,
mixing electronic rock-pop
with an oriental sound."
Tom has been living in the Middle East for over five years. The new single All Through Eternity is a collaboration with Lebanese artist Manel Mallat, and it sounds like what happens when you stop keeping your influences separate and let them find each other. The East in the West in the synth. The song as meeting place.
Explore more music, artists and sounds in the Antakly Projects Sound Room an ongoing archive of conversations with musicians, DJs and producers from around the world.
Antakly Projects Sound RoomLeila Antakly is an independent cultural interviewer, editor, and founder of Antakly Projects, the platform she launched in New York in 2003 as Ninu Nina. For more than two decades, she has interviewed artists, musicians, photographers, designers, and creative thinkers across art, music, fashion, photography, film, and contemporary culture. Her interviews are driven by curiosity, research, and direct conversation rather than celebrity, trend, or algorithm. Antakly looks for the people, ideas, and creative practices shaping culture, with particular attention to artists who deserve a deeper conversation beyond the usual press cycle. The Antakly Projects archive documents creative voices across generations, disciplines, and cities, focused not simply on what someone is promoting, but on how they think, what influences their work, and where their ideas fit within a larger cultural conversation.
