Pitchfork

8.2 - A 10-track wonder that hits all of the pleasure centers...while offering a supple-enough sound to become something of a headphone symphony…You could spend a month mapping the parts written into these three-minute tunes and still find something new on the next listen…This is vivid and immediate music, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be intricate.“

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The New Yorker

“Leverage Models...specialize in discomfiting pop music. On their second full-length album, "Whites", they sketch out nervy vignettes of characters whose experiences are informed by the minutiae of our own unsettling world"

 

Bandcamp

NEW & NOTABLE: "Art-pop that turns a critical eye on the world, as accessible as it is complex"

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PopMatters

9/10 - "Glorious...There are no genres that can confine these restless and curious musical souls...these songs impress with their tunefulness, ingenuity, and passion...all the while addressing potent cultural and political issues both personal and public...The music world can gain a great deal by paying close attention to this band. If they don't, well, maybe we don't deserve them.”

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The Guardian

"Rapturous bursts of bright horn-fuelled funk-pop…Great”  [New Band of the Day feature] ”

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Dusted

"These songs just burst into light...one of the most vital statements released in 2018"

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Untitled Magazine

“an exceptional piece of work – musically dense, rich...and heady without being over wrought...giving us hope again for what’s to come”

 

The Village Voice

"Infatuating"

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The Passion of the Weiss

“A surprisingly massive 35 minutes of arch-pop and new wave-inspired dance music…with an existential slant...Striking, ready-made anthems for turbulent times, current and foreseeable."

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Born Music

"Leverage Models create a hyper-pop miasma. a gloriously chaotic headrush...Leverage Models do not exist to adhere to existing pop blueprints, but to reinterpret the familiar...not for one millisecond is it anything short of absolutely thrilling"

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Mecca Lecca

“Underneath a maximalist pop exterior, there’s a fragile sensitivity that pushes Whites beyond being just a well-executed 21st century take on sophisti-pop...an overwhelming maximalist display that encompasses what may be Fields’ most serious and impassioned lyrics to date" 

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Other Music

"Undeniably infectious…dreamy”

 

Spin Magazine

"Dark, off-kilter pop best suited for shaking to death...a synth-powered shapeshifter...an elastic bit of oddball electroni-pop”

 

eMusic

"A definite sense of otherwordly euphoria”

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Week In Pop

"Leverage Models deliver the progressive future pop of now during today's tumultuous times. “[a] genuine and earnest labor of love…that ponders how our world has arrived at the mess we're in…yet somehow amid our universal anxiety attacks, Leverage Models send us a sense of hope"

 

Audiofemme

"Like being in a brand new, exotic and densely stimulating city… the album bears so little comparison to anything else in its category, finding the songs’ trajectories requires enough listening to get past just being dazzled by the bright lights and shiny metals”

 

Dangerous Minds

"Head-scratchingly brilliant"

 

Insound

"MP3 of the Week: off-kilter pop…uplifting”

 

Vogue (Netherlands)

“The ultimate cure for depression“

 

The Deli Magazine

"Best Emerging Artist, 2014 - Seizing on electro and drawing on the depths of consciousness, Leverage Models create deliciously vibrant music. A bubbling sonic palette doused in multiple dimensions, the band makes glorious, glistening sounds, nuanced with commentary and clever perceptive notes, that pulse with passion, short pounds and reverberating rhythms adding a complexity that never digresses from what it is – pure pop. Churning and bristling with self-confessed dark emotions, there’s a restlessness to it all, a deliberate provocativeness that thrives. It’s the masterwork of producer and creator Shannon Fields, his inspired hand sketching and shifting through the sounds of the bandmates to build music to dance, shake, groove and live to. ”

 

Origami Vinyl (Los Angeles)

"A massively catchy sound that grows on you…energizing”

 

The Daily News / Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

"Captivating…Fields impresses throughout”

 

YVYNYL

"Suddenly you realize you’ve been slowly seduced…This sucker bites hard, fangs bury deep into our subconscious and beg to you to listen again and again."

 

Ian Mathers (Resident Advisor, Dusted) on Small Immunities

"One of my two favourite records of the year; Leverage Models is both so immediately pleasurable to me and so full of depth (of sound, of feeling, of thought) that I’ve played it dozens and dozens of times and still feel like I’m discovering new things to delight in…The most humane, colourful, canny, compositionally interesting album of the year, for me.”

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Philadelphia Weekly

"A glistening, electrified dance rock record"

 

The Onion A.V. Club

"Seriously layered, ornate, and frenzied electronic transmissions…excellent”

 

Portland Mercury

"Excellent…world-spanning pop that will do to your ears what this bright July summer sun is doing to your mood”

 

The Big Takeover

"Surprising, sometimes sad and disturbing”

 

The Independent (Raleigh, NC)

"With synth timbres and insistent melodies reminiscent of Brian Eno and John Cale’s 1990 collaboration, Wrong Way Up, Leverage Models seem to be fascinated with a more direct, if no less experimental, approach to songwriting.”

 

The Michigan Daily

“Expansive and infectious ”

 

Creative Loafing (Atlanta, GA)

"Working with a refined palette of elegant textures and curious arrangements, Leverage Models breathes new life into the experimental art-pop once ballasted by such aficionados as Scritti Politti, Japan, and A Certain Ratio”

 

Tiny Mix Tapes

"Fields reaches directly back to the specifically New Wave strands of the 80s, without the self-conscious concerns of contemporaneity that innumerable other acts have long exhibited, but from there makes them truly his own, (con)forming to a new, and uniquely signature sound“

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OhMyRockness

"Grand, engaging, and wonderfully weird“

 

INDYWeek (Raleigh, NC)

"Reflective textures and racing rhythms pushing up hooks like mountain peaks…dramatic and arching, their music is meant for world tours navigated by private jets and populated by backstage legions”

 

WXPN "The Key" (Philadelphia, PA)

"Soaring and mind-swirling…warm and bright”

 

Mecca Lecca

“[Interim Deliverable EP] Anyone who knows Shannon Fields knows that he’s the kind of musician that’s capable of creating groundbreaking music…With Stars Like Fleas Fields ventured into some strange territory that other bands couldn’t possibly be capable of, but Stars Like Fleas were not the type of band that a wide audience would enjoy…. “Dreaming of Accidents” is ultimately a perfect pop song, but it’s more than just that.”

 

BlogTO (Toronto, ON)

"Leverage Models vocals reach out from underneath heavy drum machine beats & zapping synth lines. Haunting, almost gothic at times. This is heavy dance fuzz mania.”