L.E.J

Beginnings

All three women were born in 1993: Lebrun on November 21, Paris on August 26, and Saumagne on September 3. They are childhood friends from Saint Denis and have known each other since they were toddlers. Their passion has always been music: Juliette studied cello at the Conservatoire de Saint-Denis, and Lucie and Elisa studied vocal technique at the Maitrise de Radio France, a prestigious French singing school, and acquired this way a solid classical training. Lucie Lebrun also plays the piano and the saxophone, and Elisa Paris plays the piano and the harp.

In October 2013, they competed in a contest organized by the French band Tryo, covering one of their song with vocal harmonies. It was the first time they sang all together as a band. They won the contest and got to perform for a large audience; at that point, according to one source, the group did not yet have a name. They decided to go on with the band and kept posting videos on their Youtube channel, covering various artists and posting their first summer mashup in 2014. To a large extent, the group connected with listeners through social networks.

They signed a contract with Live Nation Entertainment, and started opening for artists in France, such as Grand Corps Malade. On June 22, 2015, they played as the opening act for Pharrell Williams in Monaco.

Summer 2015 and their first album

On August, 1st 2015, they posted a mashup of 11 worldwide hits of 2015, Summer 2015. It was an immediate success, getting hundreds of thousands of views within two days. On August 3, Time Magazine shared their mashup which launched a craze around the video and brought them millions of views on Youtube in less than a month. French and international media took an immediate interest in the three young women, who were a bit overwhelmed by the turn things took Indeed, they had never intended their video to have such an impact and had not foreseen such a success. Elisa said in an interview that the women would not have worn their pajamas when recording Summer 2015 if they had known that the video would have gone viral.

In December 2015, L.E.J released their first album, entitled En Attendant L'album, which contains 11 tracks, all cover songs but La Dalle, their first original composition. In this album, one can find a cover of Hanging Tree, the song from the Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. L.E.J had performed the track Hanging Tree at the Premiere of Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 in Paris on November 9, 2015.

2016: a year on the road

During 2016, the girls of L.E.J were on tour in France and abroad. They started with a tour of France in the spring, playing at Olympia Hall on May 27. During that time, they also went to Canada (they played in Montréal on March 14) and to the United States (they performed at the South By Southwest Festival and in New York City). In the summer, they toured French festivals, playing among other things in front of tens of thousands of people at Main Square Festival or in the fanzone of Saint-Denis for the final of the UEFA Euro 2016. They went back on tour in the fall of 2016, kicking it off with 3 sold out concerts at Olympia Hall on October 21, 22, and 23rd, and ending the tour with a last concert in Rennes on December 13. They also performed at the closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival on May 22, 2016 with French musician Ibrahim Maalouf. In total, L.E.J played around a 100 concerts in the year 2016.

On August 4, 2016, they posted Summer 2016 on YouTube, which is a mashup of 2016's hits, the same way they had done in 2015. It contained 23 songs and got more than 5 million views.

In September 2016, their second original composition, Le Verbe, was released on YouTube. It is a featuring with Dave Crowe from Heymoonshaker, and the video was shot in the form of a advertising spot for Audi.

In December 2016, they released an EP entitled Christmas Hors d'oeuvre that contained three tracks. Game Of Bells is a medley of Carol of the Bells and the soundtrack for the TV show Game of Thrones; the video for the song is a giant christmas-themed Mannequin Challenge. It got one million views in about a week and made it into the New York Times' christmas playlist. The EP also contains Little Drummer Boy, which is a medley of the christmas carol Little Drummer Boy and Rihanna's Man Down, and a cover of The Sound Of Silence, by Simon and Garfunkel.

2017: an upcoming original album

On February 10, 2017, the band won the award for Stage Revelation at the 32nd Victoires de la Musique ceremony, a French award ceremony that recognizes achievements in the music industry. It is the French equivalent for the Grammy Awards.

Their first original album will be released in 2017, and will mainly be in French. It will be composed of songs the three women will write, and they feel tremendous pressure not to disappoint anybody. Paris said that recording this album would be the band's greatest challenge. In an interview they gave to Purecharts, the women of L.E.J said they were proud of their work so far. They teased the new album, explaining that some songs will be a lot more produced than previous tracks, with a greater exploitation of Juliette's cello.

Awards

Nominations