Lulu Simon

About Lulu Simon

Lulu Simon started making music in her bedroom in Portland around 2015, layering vocals over beats she'd program at night after her day job at a design studio. The early tracks were sparse and a bit haunting—just her voice, some synths, and drum machines that sounded like they cost about forty dollars. She'd post them to SoundCloud without much ceremony, and somehow Digital Hearts found its way onto a few playlists. That song's minimalist approach to heartbreak—all restraint and negative space—got her noticed by people who were tired of indie pop that tried too hard.

Her 2017 debut EP Late Signals collected those early bedroom recordings and added a few new ones. The production was still pretty lo-fi, but you could hear her figuring out how to build atmosphere. Neon Nights became the standout, with its pulsing bassline and lyrics about driving around a city that feels emptier when you're with the wrong person. College radio picked it up, then some Spotify editorial playlists, and suddenly she had enough of an audience to quit the design job.

The first full-length, Chemical Reaction, came out in 2019 and showed what she could do with an actual studio budget. She worked with producer James Chen, who'd done some stuff with other Portland indie acts, and they spent months getting the textures right. The title track became her biggest song to that point—it's the one where she sings about attraction feeling like science, all predictable outcomes and molecular bonds. The album oscillated between introspective synth-pop and more upbeat electronic moments, though even the danceable songs had this underlying melancholy.

Echoes dropped in 2021 and found her leaning harder into electronic production, almost shedding the indie pop label entirely. She'd been listening to a lot of UK garage and ambient techno, and you can hear it. The songs breathed more, stretched out longer, left room for the beats to do the emotional work. Some longtime fans weren't sure about the shift, but tracks like Synthetic Love—which builds for three minutes before her vocals even come in—showed she was interested in more than just verse-chorus-verse.

These days she's based in Berlin, which feels almost too predictable for someone making her kind of music, but apparently the move helped her tap into the broader European electronic scene. She's been collaborating with producers there and playing festival sets that lean more into DJ territory. There's talk of a new album for late 2024, and based on the singles she's dropped, it sounds like she's pushing even further into dance music while keeping that emotional core that made the early stuff compelling. She's one of those artists who's always chasing the next sound rather than perfecting the last one.

Small venues where people actually stand still and listen. Her shows are more attentive than rowdy, with a crowd that leans in. Sound matters to her—things can sound thin if it's not set up right—but when it clicks, the electronic elements hit harder live than on record.

Known for Digital Hearts, Neon Nights, Chemical Reaction, Echoes, Synthetic Love

See Lulu Simon Live