In a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of Los Angeles, long-time friends Paul Klein, Les Priest and Jake Goss squished in front of the dusty screen of an ancient laptop. They watched as emails from music labels poured in just six days after the trio posted singles “Hot Lights” and “Walk Away,” written and recorded in that very room, to SoundCloud.
Two years later, that one-bedroom has been upgraded to a tour bus traveling all across North America, with those three friends becoming known to millions of fans as LANY.
With a set of 15 songs, classic and colorful, yet minimalist, lighting and set design and the unforgettable vibe of an endless summer of haze and hopeful romance, LANY’s first headlining tour is making its way to the Royale on Friday for “LANY: THE KINDA TOUR.”
THE KINDA TOUR, named for their EP called “kinda,” released in June, will show fans the band’s familiar dream-pop, new wave electronic, mixed with bits of ‘80s synth and ‘90s R&B, but LANY was not born to be stuck in any specific genre.
“We definitely have people that we love that we grew up listening to,” said lead singer Paul Klein in a phone interview with The Daily Free Press. “But when we started the band, we never had a conversation like, ‘Hey, let’s try to make this record, or sound like this band, or make music like this artist,’ which is why I think we’ve been so successful at finding our own sound. LANY is very much a sound, and we love all kinds of artists, but we love just being us and doing us.”
This one-of-a-kind sound is what led the band to be named No. 1 on a list of Spotify’s “Most Streamed Artists on Discover Weekly” as part of a study Spotify conducted about their “Discover Weekly” playlist program from July 2015 to April 2016, beating out artists like Sam Smith and Imagine Dragons with over 22 million streams. LANY was also No. 1 on the “Billboard + Twitter Emerging Artist” chart with their single “yea, babe, no way.” Their unique sound finds its way into the hearts of a vast range of listeners, resonating universally with anyone who has ever been young, ever felt invincible, been in love, lost, lonely or just really loves California.
The universality of their music is consistent with the motivation for LANY’s creation. LANY (pronounced “lay-nee”) is an acronym for Los Angeles, New York, to capture the essence, life and art of the two vastly different cities, but also to symbolize the connection between two distant places and everywhere that falls in between.
“We’ll just continue to grow and try to reach as many people as possible,” Klein said. “We want to be a household name, and eventually play arenas around the world. We want to reach as many people as possible.”
Klein stressed that although so much of their lives and their surroundings have changed, the way they make music will always remain the same. Otherwise, they would lose the dream that got them started in the first place.
“It stays the same as far as the three of us,” he said. “We write and play everything ourselves and Les [Priest] still records and mixes everything.”
With THE KINDA TOUR in full swing and a debut album aimed to be released sometime in 2017, LANY is skyrocketing out of that one-bedroom apartment straight to certain fame. However, Klein, Priest and Goss are not going to let their dreams coming true change who they are.
“We’re just getting started,” Klein said. “We didn’t get into this to be famous. We just do this because this is just what we love and what we’re made to do, and we’ll just keep doing it.”