Dom La Nena To Release Her Fourth Studio Album Leon in April

Following the acclaimed release of Tempo in 2021, Dom La Nena, the stage name of Brazilian cellist Dominique Pinto, is back with her latest album, Leon, set to be released April 7th. Titled after the affectionate nickname she gave her cello - a gift from her parents at the age of 11 that would ultimately change her life thereafter - Leon is a declaration of love to her lifelong accomplice.

With Leon, La Nena returns to her roots, diving headlong into an intimate, sensitive and transcendental setting conjured by the lush, fully instrumental compositions that provide a mesmerizing and emotionally charged listening experience across its ten songs. The first single, "Universo," - played entirely on the cello, with baroque, neo-classical and pop influences - is out now.

Leon tells, first and foremost, the story of La Nena's discovery of classical music. A native of the Southern Brazilian city, Porto Alegre, La Nena's roots have always seeped into her music through beautiful variations of the Latin American repertoire. Her first musical epiphany however came through Vivaldi, after which she continued to flourish in the company of the romantic works of Chopin and the minimalism of Philip Glass. At eight years old, Dom's family moved to Paris, and it was in the French capital where she was first introduced to the cello, and to her musical partner Leon. By wielding the bow, she was able to find peace amidst the difficulties of moving; uprooting and rerooting. More than just a modest student cello, Leon became a confidant, friend and companion. In the times of joy, pain and in the solitude of hours and hours and hours spent practicing, La Nena developed a fusional relationship with her instrument, which the musician pays homage to on her new album, twenty years after their first encounter.

Prior to creating Leon, La Nena has been lauded worldwide for her wide-ranging works, including several critically acclaimed albums (her 2013 debut Ela, 2015's Soyo, and 2021's Tempo), her contributions to several film scores, and as part of of Birds on a Wire, her project with Rosemary Standley which offers covers of songbook classics from artists like Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. From record to record, Dom La Nena has sung about time, her dreams and her fears, in the form of tender and poetic songs, always supported by her cello. Now, with Leon, every blended note and pluck of her cello strikes an even deeper resonance - without lyrics, the instrumentation is free to take on an even wider variety of emotional shapes.

Composed and recorded during two months alone with her cello, and then mixed by Noah Georgeson (known for his collaborations with Rodrigo Amarante, Devendra Banhart), Leon emerged out of a desire to both renew and return - it is a quest for simplicity, emotion and beauty, responding only to intuition, improvisation and a single constraint: to compose only with, and for, the cello. The process was an unprecedented exercise for La Nena who, after so many collaborative endeavors, was able to reconnect with her instrument, resuming the course of their inner dialogue as a soloist.

As such, with this new release, Dom La Nena has found herself released. Freed from the rigidity of classical discipline and the weight of the repertoire, Leon allows for a glimpse of her own inner world and imagination, and has allowed La Nena to refocus on her sound, her texture and those compositional nuances that showcase the composer's ability to create strikingly profound moments through the use of repetitive patterns, refined orchestrations and drones.

Throughout Leon, La Nena creates music that is sumptuous in atmosphere, conjuring a range of motifs from high drama to simmering contemplation with stunning ease. From first single, "Universo", which was composted to illustrate feelings of contradiction and our desire to be constantly in action while at the same time facing a great void, to "Break,", which La Nena created while ruminating on the world being paused by the Covid pandemic, to "Last Day," which was expresses the sentiment of leaving something, someone, or someplace behind - all of the pieces on Leon move with elegance and weightiness from track to track.

But Leon only requires your attention to draw you into its world, letting you conjure your own associated images in the process. "What I really like about instrumental music is that you can give freedom to the listener to escape into their own world while listening to it," La Nena says, and Leon is a triumph in that and many other regards, a record that will doubtless capture the imagination of new listeners for years to come.

Listen to the new single here:

To post a comment, you must register and login.