Tomboy, Leverage Models

NYC-based Electro Pop duo, Sarah Aument and William Shore


While Leverage Models hasn’t aggressively promoted the music to a wide audience its debut album, released in late 2013 on Hometapes (home to other pop experimentalists such as Bear in Heaven, Landlady, Pattern is Movement, & Celestial Shore), received critical acclaim from a few higher profile sources, including The Village Voice, The Guardian, Spin, BrooklynVegan, PopMatters, Paste Magazine, Other Music, Insound, Vogue, and Pitchfork (the latter giving the record an unusually high 8.2, remarking that "you could spend a month mapping the parts written into these three-minute tunes and still find something new on the next listen"). Son Lux's Ryan Lott asked the band to support Son Lux on tour in 2014 and the band's performances, noted for their "tent-revival fury", drew further accolades from regional weeklies across North America. Leverage Models has performed with Prince Rama, Medicine, Escort, Colin Stetson, Gavin Russom (LCD Soundsystem, Crystal Ark), Puro Instinct, Helado Negro, Sinkane, and many others.

After nearly a year of silence, a remodel of the group emerged at Brooklyn's 2015 Northside Festival with a 6 piece band, newly co-fronted by Tiny Hazard's Alena Spanger. Current performances ground Spanger & Shannon Fields' ecstatic voices with up-tempo, high-gloss pop, head-scratching Fripp-worthy guitar solos, and a frenetic electro-acoustic Latin percussion ensemble. The forthcoming LP, Something Bright (release details TBA), brings the extremes of the first record into sharper relief. Magical realist character studies (populated by investment bankers, dancing corpses, hyper-masculine apocalypse-obsessed relatives, white collar criminals, future senators, Drake-obsessed activists, estranged & shrinking childhood friends, shut-ins and weak, absent fathers) continue to inhabit the same dark, dream-state landscapes as on the debut LP. All within an eccentric collection of soaring, chest-rattling, crystalline pop songs that embrace but gently subvert the pervasive clichés of mainstream pop in search of something immediate, euphoric, resistant to common sense & category, occasionally uncomfortable, and emotionally true.