Britain's Leo Kalyan is an emotive, electronic-based singer/songwriter who makes yearning, atmospheric R&B-infused pop and dance music. Based in East London, Kalyan was born into a Muslim family and spent his youth traveling between London and Lahore.

 

 

A student of classical Indian music, he grew up listening to a mix of Bollywood and world music, as well as trip-hop and R&B artists like Massive Attack, Sade, and Janet Jackson. Although he had experimented with making music for several years, around 2014 he began teaching himself to produce in earnest and subsequently uploaded remixes (or "refixes") of Jessie Ware's "Running" and Duke Dumont's "Need U" to SoundCloud.

 

 

The tracks caught on, gaining blog attention and helping Kalyan rise to the top of influential music blog aggregator Hype Machine. Also around this time, he also collaborated with Karma Kid and MNEK on the track "Over You." Kalyan had an even bigger year in 2015 with the release of his Silver Linings EP, featuring the single "Fingertips." The track went viral, nabbing over a million streaming plays and earning him a spot on the BBC 1Xtra playlist. From there, he was awarded PRS Music Foundation funding, which helped him travel to perform at Austin's SXSW in 2016.