Northern Dial Artist Profile

Ada Lea

Montréal, Québec, Canada

Ada Lea is the recording project of Montréal songwriter, musician and visual artist Alexandra Levy. Her 2019 debut, what we say in private, introduced a diaristic strain of indie rock in which intimate songwriting and Levy's visual-art practice inform one another. The 2020 EP woman, here extended that world while beginning a collaboration with producer and engineer Marshall Vore.

Levy widened the frame on 2021's one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, a record built from stories and memories mapped onto Montréal. She began writing the material during an artist residency in Banff before recording in Los Angeles with Vore and collaborators including Harrison Whitford and Tasy Hudson. The result moved between folk, soft rock and art-pop while keeping place, memory and narrative at the centre of the songs.

After the archival 2024 EP notes, Ada Lea returned with when i paint my masterpiece, recorded largely live in rural Ontario with producer Luke Temple. Its acoustic, ensemble-driven approach connected her work to older Canadian folk traditions without abandoning the imaginative storytelling that defines the project. Across those records, Levy has built a distinctly Montréal body of work that treats songs less as isolated singles than as pieces of larger emotional and geographic worlds.