The Brief

Plastered on a chain-link fence post in the Silver Lake Meadows park, deep blue against the backdrop of the reservoir, is a sticker with a QR code made up of tiny black stars. “Maude Latour: Sugar Water, August 16,” it announces.

These QR code stickers took fans to a secret song capsule: When they scanned the code with a smartphone they got a digital link to four unreleased songs off the 24-year-old pop artist’s debut album.

The city of Los Angeles is prominent in several songs on the album “Sugar Water,” which is out today. Latour moved here in January, and the emerging artist has wasted no time making herself visible in the city. Last month, she posted a TikTok video announcing she’d personally placed 100 QR codes throughout the city.

“if u find them u can listen to *4* songs off my album,” she wrote across the screen. The video shows her plastering stickers on signposts, park benches and trash cans. A version of the video she posted on Instagram Reels took off and landed over 36,000 views.

While leaking four of your own songs before an official album release might seem unconventional, it’s no surprise if you consider the way Latour has built community around her music on both coasts.

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Annie Rupertus

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LAist

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Annie Rupertus

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LAist

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What she’s known for

In an interview with LAist, Latour told us her art is about more than just the music itself. She cherishes tearing down “the fourth wall” between her and her fans, mostly young women in their early 20s. (Latour has described the community that follows her music as “small and kinda culty.”)

“When I meet someone who knows my music out in the world, it's just this moment,” she said. “We suddenly meet and I know their soul and they know my soul.”

Her songs are upbeat and vulnerable, prompting listeners to reflect on their own complicated friendships and first loves.

Latour, who is currently signed to Warner Records, cultivates this bond both in-person and online.

She frequently goes live on Instagram from her Silver Lake apartment and talks directly with fans about songs she’s working on or what’s happening in her life, actively responding to fan comments and opening up for Q&As.

“I’m talking to my phone alone in my room…and it's like I'm hanging out with like 50 of my friends just randomly,” she said. “It's such a reciprocal relationship and I get a lot out of it.”

The small group sessions have led to a following she hopes to keep growing. So far she has more than 72,000 followers on Instagram — a community she’s been steadily building since 2019. On TikTok, she’s received more than 5 million likes and racked up a number of viral videos, and she currently has about 550,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

Latour also hosts informal, spontaneous meetups in public parks to hang out with fans and celebrate milestones in her career.

She said her latest trick, the QR code stickers, was another way of redefining the social norms of how people interact with artists.

“You can find my music by performing a scavenger hunt, and I just love making life more interesting and beautiful, and I hope I keep finding deeper ways to do that as I grow older,” she said.

How she got her start

Latour was born in Sweden, lived in Hong Kong as a kid, and moved to Manhattan for high school.

She’s been working on her debut album “Sugar Water" since she graduated from Columbia University in 2022 with a degree in philosophy. She released her fourth EP, “Twin Flame,” last summer.

She told us the turning point of her career played out in California.

“And if I ever make it out to Cali, of course I’ll miss you all the time, think about the summertime,” she sings in “Minerals & Diamonds,” off her 2023 EP. Beyond traveling back and forth between New York and L.A. to record music, she also spent some time on the West Coast between high school and college.

About 15 minutes into our interview, Latour stopped and said she was going to tell us a secret.

“A week before college started, I got a call that I made it to The Voice, the television show,” she confessed. “I had been auditioning over the summer and stuff and then I got this call and it was like, ‘Oh my God, I made it, like this is gonna change my life.’”

That’s when she flew to L.A. for the first time. “I thought I was gonna make it, so then I had to take a gap year for The Voice and then I ended up not getting any chair turns and [the episode] didn't get aired.”

She giggled when she said this.

“But now I'm so glad. That caused me to take the whole year off and I probably wouldn't have made my first EP without that happening. It was like, OK, let me take this music thing super seriously now," she said.

For her audition, Latour covered the song “Liability” by Lorde. She remembers enthusiastically taking advice from judge Alicia Keys, who she recalls saying, “Go to Columbia, do your thing, go to college, and just keep going.”

Driving has been a frequent motif in Latour's music throughout her career.

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Adam Alonzo

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Courtesy Warner Records

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In the following years as a college student, Latour focused more on songwriting and recording her own “bedroom pop” from her apartment near Columbia, which she shared with three roommates.

Now, the artist said L.A. feels like a “fresh start.”

“It's amazing to be surrounded by people who care so much about this just like I do,” she said, recalling a chance encounter with 26-year-old alternative R&B artist Hope Tala at a coffee shop. “It's inspiring as heck.”

How L.A. shaped her new album

Latour said one of her favorite songs on her new album is about a drive from San Diego to L.A.

“We go road trippin’, driving south of the bay, and I tell her how I’m lonely, I’ve been feeling the pain,” she sings on track 11, “Infinite Roses.”

Latour said her debut album is, in part, about learning to drive.

“As I was making the album, I was listening to music in cars for the first time, like blasting music,” Latour said. “I feel like it changed how I was listening to my demos.”

She drives all the time now that she lives in L.A., and said that when making “Sugar Water,” she wanted to channel the feeling she got while playing one of her songs on the freeway with the windows down.

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Annie Rupertus

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LAist

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What’s next?

Latour’s music is driven by lofty hopes of making change in the world.

“You can be yourself, you can be whatever you want, anything is real” she sings in “Summer of Love,” the fifth track on “Sugar Water.”

“How do you maintain that childhood spirit of optimism?” she asked in our interview. “Music helps me do that."

"The point of music and so much art is to keep people energized” and believing that the world can be better, she added.

She’s still figuring out how to do that, but in the meantime, she’s excited that her new music is out in the world — for everyone now, not just those lucky enough to stumble upon one of her QR codes.

This fall, she’s headed out on tour opening for pop powerhouse Cari Fletcher, known as FLETCHER. But before then, Latour has plans in L.A. She said she’s organizing a listening party in Silver Lake to celebrate Friday’s album release — in her words, a “DJ rave Maude club night.”

When? Where?

She’s not saying.

“I'm just gonna put the address on the internet and people are gonna just pull up.”

A criminal justice watchdog is calling into question whether Latinos in the L.A. County Superior Court get a fair shot at bail.

The new report from the nonprofit La Defensa, which advocates for reform in the legal system, analyzes a sample of pretrial decisions from 2025 which had been documented by community court-watching volunteers.

One of the key findings was that defendants who were perceived to be Latino had an average bail amount of $157,700 — more than 15 times higher than white defendants and nearly three times higher than Black defendants.

Studies show that inability to pay bail can affect defendants’ livelihoods and their ability to defend themselves, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

“ Most families — no matter what they did, no matter what they sold — cannot actually purchase that person’s freedom to give them the fighting chance to go against the state,” Titilayọ Rasaki, La Defensa’s state policy and legal affairs director.

The L.A. County Superior Court says it’s following the law on bail requirements and that the findings are missing context because observation is limited.

How court-watching works

La Defensa’s Court Watch LA program is a community-led effort to document and hold the courts accountable. They train volunteers to go in and observe cases.

The volunteers take notes on the charges, the judge’s conduct and the person’s criminal history, if it comes up. That then gets analyzed against publicly available case information and state law. Programs like this exist in several other cities around the country.

For the latest report, La Defensa volunteers observed 140 felony and misdemeanor criminal cases, chosen at random, between January to November 2025.

Judicial accountability lead Bryanna Siguenza explained how she decided where to send the volunteers.

“ I choose a department, specifically ones that are pretty busy, have high case loads, and are arraignment and pretrial,” she said.

What watchers saw

Racial disparities in pretrial settings have been researched at local, state and national levels, but La Defensa’s findings are based entirely on human observation, Siguenza said.

The volunteers are trained to listen for important details that come up in proceedings, but they may not always get the full story behind the charges, like a defendant’s criminal history.

L.A. County Superior Court spokesperson Rob Oftring said the report needs more context.

“Many of the report’s findings, for example, do not appear to account for charge severity or criminal history, both of which are legally significant factors in any release decision…” he wrote in a statement.

La Defensa did not include in its report what charges had been filed in the cases observed. However, according to the report, comparable charges still had disproportionate bail outcomes that “couldn’t be explained by charge severity alone.”

The severity of charges legally informs bail decisions. The Superior Court is required to have standard bail amounts based on the crime, which judges have discretion to adjust.

State law also requires judges to weigh issues like public safety in bail decisions, as well as the defendant’s ability to post bail. According to the volunteers’ observations, the judges considered the latter in just a quarter of cases when setting bail.

Oftring said the court has taken steps to reduce money bail’s usage as allowed by law.

“Bail at arraignment is set only after both the defense and prosecution have been heard and the judge has weighed the specific facts of the case,” his statement read.

The limits of the findings

Oftring said the court values the role organizations like Court Watch LA play in keeping the justice system accountable, but that the sample size of the researchers used in their report is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

Roughly 272,000 criminal cases took place during that time period, according to Oftring.

Representatives from La Defensa said they know the report is only a snapshot of the system, and that human observation has its limits.

That’s why in November, they requested 10 years of de-identified data to analyze whether bail outcomes differ across judges, courthouses and demographic groups. Rasaki said they haven’t received it.

“  We would say release the data … by all means, we want to partner. We want to analyze,” she said.

Oftring told LAist they are working on several projects that “provide data-informed scrutiny of how the court operates.”

Southern Californians are in for yet another scorching weekend.

The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for much of the region through Monday, with temperatures expected to hit their peak on Sunday.

Highs in the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and other inland areas of L.A. County are expected to range from the mid-90s to about 105 degrees. Downtown Los Angeles and much of Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties will get up to the lower 90s. Beaches will also be hot — in the lower 80s.

Moving farther east, things get really toasty. Forecasters have issued a more severe extreme heat warning for parts of the Inland Empire, where temperatures could get up to 108 degrees, and for the Coachella Valley, where they could hit 120.

Humidity will likely also continue to add to the discomfort, but will be concentrated in areas closer to the coast, where it will keep nighttime temperatures relatively warm and make it more difficult to cool down. Inland areas will feel drier.

Those who are most at-risk from the heat are people who work or spend time outside, people without access to air conditioning and those who are either over 65 or young children.

Forecasters are also warning of dangerous rip currents and swells along the coast this weekend.

If you’re headed to the beach to beat the heat, as many Southern Californians likely are, they recommend staying out of the water or, if you do go swimming, stay in front of lifeguards. It’s also a good idea to avoid jetties and tidal rocks.

Wildfire risk

This weekend will also come with a high risk of wildfires.

Forecasters warn that fire danger will be elevated through at least Monday, driven by heat, dry vegetation and low humidity levels away from the coast.

Despite some extra moisture in the air over the last several weeks, there hasn’t been enough to actually produce rain. Without precipitation, and under consistently high temperatures, plants will continue to dry out and become fuel.

“We have humidity, but it's not reaching the saturation point. Therefore, we won't have a cloud. We won't have precipitation,” said Rong Fu, an atmospheric scientist at UCLA who specializes in weather patterns and wildfires.

Fu said a system of high atmospheric pressure sitting over the Western U.S. is pushing warm, dry air across the Sierra Nevada from inland deserts and into Southern California.

That can generate what’s known as downslope wind. Those winds plus the already dry conditions align to create some especially dangerous fire weather.

One spark can easily turn into a large blaze, and humans are the most common cause of wildfires in Southern California, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

People can accidentally start wildfires in a range of ways, including throwing a lit cigarette into dry brush or dragging a chain behind a vehicle, creating sparks. One of the most common human causes is improperly extinguished camp fires.

Lightning can also start wildfires but is unlikely under current weather conditions. Southern California has seen minimal thunderstorms this summer.

The new normal?

Heatwaves in the summer and fall are obviously not new for Southern California, but they are getting worse.

Much of the heat currently blanketing the region is being driven by the high-pressure system, which traps warm air and compresses it against the ground, heating it even further. Forecasters say it’s likely to stay that way through the end of July.

But high-pressure systems like this one usually don’t stick around this long.

“For this pattern to linger almost two weeks — yeah, I would say, from a climatological point of view — that's pretty unusual,” Fu said.

One major driver of the change, Fu said, is climate change: As the climate warms, this kind of “anomalous” high pressure system will become stronger and more frequent.

And one consequence of hotter and longer heatwaves, is extended elevated periods of risky fire weather.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Los Angeles will be under a heat wave advisory until Monday evening as temperatures show no signs of letting up over the weekend.

Temperatures will linger in the high 80s and low 90s in downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods, including Koreatown, Pico Union and Westlake.

The National Weather Service projects temperatures will peak on Sunday afternoon. Meteorologist Bryan Lewis with the National Weather Service said residents can expect more humidity than usual. 

While dense, urban centers have more concrete and see more vehicle traffic, downtown and the surrounding areas will not be the hottest locations during this heatwave in the Southland, as the Antelope Valley will be under an extreme heat advisory over the weekend.

During hot weather, the beach is an immediate go-to for folks that want to stay cool, but Lewis warns against this as the surf will be extra choppy.

The Pacific Coast will see large swells “coming up from tropical systems off the coast of Mexico,” Lewis said. “We are issuing a beach hazard statement that’ll be in effect through at least the weekend [which] may be extended.” 

While the weather is expected to cool down on Monday, forecasts show that another heatwave could develop by the end of next week.

Pools nearby

Find a pool or splash pad nearest you.

Echo Park Pool

Eleanor Green Roberts Aquatic Center

Cooling centers

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Pico Union Branch Library

Felipe de Neve Branch Library (Westlake)

Pio Pico – Koreatown Branch Library

Councilmember Heather Hutt’s office recommends residents to rest in shade or a building with air conditioning and to stay hydrated with plenty of water.

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