Meet the songwriter who leaked her own album with stickers across LA

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.”