Ethereal folk artist Melas Leukos releases her latest single, “Valiant One,” the title track from her forthcoming debut album slated to drop later this summer via Animalia Music.
Talking about the album, Leukos shares, “‘Valiant One’ is a passage. It’s a remembering—a homecoming to what beats wild beneath the skin. Each track is a doorway, and this song is the key.”
Produced by long-term collaborator Tone Ranger, aka Alex Simon, the upcoming album was written over the course of eight years and enlarges and elaborates the otherworldly folk sound Leukos introduced on her debut EP, Fable, a graceful, almost spectral sensation of pressure and subtle textures.
Outside of music, Leukos is a weaver of stories, whose illustrations, photography, and movement practices form an immersive mythology. She has performed these sacraments of sound at San Miguel Chapel and Taos Mesa Amphitheater, transforming each stage into hallowed ground.
Painted by the spellbinding voice of Melas Leukos, singing “sword drawn against the sun,” “Valiant One” opens on a melody that drifts and glides on softly shimmering surfaces riding on a crisp, measured rhythm that infuses the tune with the haunting sense of time’s passage. Rippling, chromatic harmonics swell and lessen, creating undulating waves of mystical colors.
Leukos’ bewitching voice captures the feeling of fearlessly exchanging the haven of certainty for the mysterious ambiguity of the unknown, a realm of entirely dissimilar paradigms, a place where you either discover yourself or lose yourself.
Vaguely reminiscent of Joni Mitchell melded with Julia Fordham, Leukos wields her evocative, Siren-like voice as a numinous instrument, transporting listeners into the Empyrean on her mesmerizing timbres. It’s the voice of an angelic Medusa – exquisitely gorgeous and revelatory.
Unspooling on a lush, elegant, atmospheric soundscape, “Valiant One” unfolds on the sublime tones of the voice of Melas Leukos.
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