text by MAYA KOTOMORI
photography LIV SOLOMON
Lourdes “Lola” Leon, known to the music world as Lolahol, has a single white tulip tucked into her cleavage, a bit of skin-as-accessory, accentuating her black leather jacket and matching low-slung pants. She’s just debuted music from her forthcoming EP with her band, guitarist David Gagliardi, drummer Russell Holzman aka Starpowerdrummer, and producer Sammy Burgess, at Nightclub 101, the East Village’s newest haunt in a friends-and-family style show featuring the DJ stylings of industry pals 2D0GS. Post-set, patrons mingle about, dodging early St. Patrick’s Day celebrants. Cigarettes and joints serve as digestifs to Lola’s performance, a performance that was nothing short of a revelation.
Her voice, a potent blend of strength and vulnerability, reverberated through the venue, ensnaring the audience in its grasp. The new music feels like a modern homage to Depeche Mode with a synth-pop allure, and a jazz standard vocal—more than what anyone can assign to the sound, it is sincere, and it is Lola’s and Lola’s alone. One lyric stands out as a genuine question: “Have I changed, will I change again?”
“I feel like that’s something lost in music—just working with people because you actually want to,” Lola tells me in a later interview on Zoom. “Hanging out, vibing, and then creating something wonderful together.” This is an authentic approach to music-making that the artist found in a non-linear way. “I’m good friends with Eartheater. She heard these little nothing-demos I’d made, and thought there was something really important there and pushed me to pursue it.”
From there came Go, Lolahol’s 2022 debut EP, which she co-produced with Eartheater as well as Tony Seltzer, Shlohmo, Hara Kiri, and Burgess, her producer and longtime collaborator who is also one of her oldest friends. Lola’s path within music is built on a foundation of dance, collaboration, and artistic earnestness. This unique perspective is due in part to her upbringing surrounded by music. The eldest daughter of Madonna, a woman widely known as the mother of modern pop music, and dancer Carlos Leon, Lola is clearly drawn to the intimacy that comes with sound, the closeness that comes to living in music as well as performing it. In that regard, many of her peers in the arts are her dear friends. Lola cites her friends as her greatest inspirations when it comes to pushing her sound. “I think there’s a way that people are taught to be—especially people in the public eye and so media trained—that is made only for views and clicks. It’s basically watered a lot of the arts down,” says Lola. “I don’t want to ever do that to my work. I care about responding to the people I respect, my peers, who are connected to a collective consciousness, a soul.”
Stepping into Nightclub 101 at the beginning of the evening felt like entering a room of friends and friends-of-friends—it’s clear that everyone in the room has a maximum of three degrees of separation from one another, an eclectic mosaic of punk enthusiasts, gearheads, and DJs-who-know-other-DJs. Lola’s crew is less an entourage than a group of her closest friends. Aimee Grumbach, mega-talented dancer and the owner of perhaps the best-maintained curls in the tristate area, tells me she met Lola in college. “She invited me to hang out with her in her dorm after class once, and we’ve been friends ever since,” she says. A later YouTube search would show me a 2023 video of Aimee and Lola clad in bikini tops and Adidas track pants dancing together on stage at Brava Madrid Festival in Spain during a live performance of Lolahol’s first single, “Lock&Key.”
“I think the world is greatly lacking sincerity, especially in art. It’s really depressing, to be honest…There’s a formula now—content, views, what gets clicks,” Lola tells me. This ethos permeates her work, striving to establish a connection that transcends engagement.
Her recent singles are imbued with rich synth textures and explore a spectrum of emotion—from romantic musings to expressions of frustration and defiance—a portrait of an artist unafraid to traverse complex emotional landscapes. This type of development is not only a part of the Lolahol sound, but also something the artist builds into her process. “I feel like the wall I’ve built around myself is penetrable. I wouldn’t say it’s coming down at all, because I’d like to keep that there for the rest of my life,” says Lola. “But there’s doors in the wall, and they’re being opened one by one, and I’m realizing there are other types of music that I can make, that I can allow myself to feel romantic and happy and not just angry and mad all the time.”
Lola’s approach to music is deeply rooted in movement, an intuitive, body-first connection to rhythm that stems from her years as a dancer. “I think dance and music are synonymous. I grew up doing ballet until I was 19, and when I went to [SUNY] Purchase, I discovered modern dance, and it changed my life because I knew I didn’t want to be a ballet dancer, I wasn’t emotionally connected to it,” she says. “I started doing Gaga dance, which is a technique that Ohad Naharin, the creative director of Batsheva dance company, created. It’s a sensory-based improv where you are pushing your body to every limit it can possibly go, and giving yourself no limitations.” This philosophy of boundless exploration—of trusting instinct over imposed structure—seeps into her music. It’s why her work resists categorization, slipping between electronic, jazz, and synth-pop with a dancer’s natural elasticity. Just as Gaga dance rejects rigidity in favor of organic, uninhibited expression, Lola’s sound revels in its own fluidity, each song an unrepeatable moment of sonic motion.
And the music is slinky, spellbinding (see: “Spelling,” one of her singles released in 2023). There are moments of Portishead-like trip-hop nostalgia, an eerie intimacy that sneaks up on you. Her lyrics, often wrapped in a sense of longing, teeter between the dreamlike and the deeply felt—moody, melancholic, and achingly present. In “Spelling,” she sings, “You don’t know me, but I know you,” a line that feels whispered through time, achy with unresolved desire. Her voice, at times barely above a breath, at others cutting through with sharp, urgent clarity, embodies the essence of movement as music—stretching, contracting, reaching, but never static.
This evening exemplifies Lola’s aim with her music: to cut through noise with earnestness, to dare to care. Her next EP only builds upon the slinky-sultry feeling of Go. “The similarities are, like, The Importance of Being Earnest to quote Oscar Wilde,” says Lola. “In terms of energy, I’m at a different point in my life than I was when I had written the other songs. These songs feel a bit more sincere, more like me opening the doors in the wall around myself, and stepping through.”
“Be sincere.” A quote from MJ Cole—a huge inspiration for her music, says Lola—but also the slogan for her merch, emblazoned across the chest of t-shirts at the front of the venue. If there were a message to be taken from the night, it’s that sincerity is the most radical thing an artist can offer. And Lola, standing amidst her friends, tulip still tucked into her cleavage, is proving that sincerity still has a pulse.