Meet the Songwriter Who Shared Her Own Sticker Book in Los Angeles

On a chain-link fence post in Silver Lake Meadows Park, a dark blue sticker against a body of water, with a QR code made of small black stars. “Maude Latour: Sugar Water, August 16,” it says.

QR code stickers transported fans to a secret song capsule: after scanning the code with a smartphone, fans were given a digital link to four unreleased songs from the 24-year-old pop artist’s debut album.

The city of Los Angeles features prominently on several tracks on “Sugar Water,” out today. Latour moved here in January, and the budding artist has wasted no time in making herself known in the city. Last month, she released TikTok Video announcing that she had personally placed 100 QR codes across the city.

“if you find them, you can listen to *4* songs from my album,” she wrote on the screen. The video shows her slapping the stickers on road signs, park benches and trash cans. A version of the video she posted on Instagram Reels went viral and has racked up more than 36,000 views.

While it may seem unconventional to reveal four of her own songs ahead of the album’s official release, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider the way Latour has built a community around her music on both coasts.

What is she famous for?

In an interview with LAist, Latour told us that her art is more than just music. She loves to break down the “fourth wall” between herself and her fans, who are mostly young women in their 20s. (Latour has Described describes the community that follows her music as “small and somewhat sectarian”).

“When I meet someone who knows my music in the world, that’s the moment,” she said. “Suddenly we meet and I know his soul and he knows mine.”

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

Latour, who is currently signed to Warner Records, nurtures that bond both in person and online.

She often goes live on Instagram from her apartment in Silver Lake and talks directly to fans about the songs she’s working on or what’s going on in her life, actively responding to fan comments and answering questions.

“I’m on my phone in my room by myself… and it’s like I’m hanging out with 50 friends, just randomly,” she said. “It’s such a mutual relationship and I get a lot out of it.”

The small-group sessions have earned her a following she hopes to continue to grow. To date, she has over 72,000 followers on Instagram—a community she’s been steadily building since 2019. She’s received over 5 million likes on TikTok, amassed multiple viral videos, and currently has around 550,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

Latour also organizes informal and spontaneous meetings. meetings in public parks to meet fans and celebrate important moments in their career.

She added that her latest trick, QR code stickers, is another way to redefine social norms about how people interact with artists.

“My music can be found by playing a game of hide and seek, and I just love making life more interesting and beautiful. I hope that as I get older I will find more and more profound ways to do that,” she said.

How she started her career

Latour was born in Sweden, lived in Hong Kong as a child, and then moved to Manhattan to attend high school.

Since she was 10 years old, she has been working on her debut album, Sugar Water. He graduated from Columbia University in 2022 with a BA in Philosophy. Last summer, she released her fourth EP, Twin Flame.

She told us that the turning point in her career occurred in California.

“And if I ever make it to Cali, of course I’ll miss you all the time, think about the summer,” she sings on “Minerals & Diamonds” from her 2023 EP. In addition to traveling back and forth between New York and Los Angeles to record music, she also spent some time on the West Coast between high school and college.

About 15 minutes into the interview, Latour stopped and said she had a secret to tell us.

“A week before classes started at the university, I got a call that I had arrived at the place Voice, TV show,” she said. “I auditioned all summer and stuff, and then I got this call and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I got it, like it’s going to change my life.'”

That was when she first flew to Los Angeles. “I thought I could do it, so I had to take a year off to Voice and ultimately I didn’t get any chance to play the chair and (the episode) didn’t air.”

She giggled when she said that.

“But now I’m so happy. It made me take a whole year off and I probably wouldn’t have recorded my first EP if that hadn’t happened. It was like, OK, let me take this music thing super seriously now,” she said.

For her audition, Latour performed a cover of Lorde’s “Liability,” and she remembers enthusiastically accepting the advice of judge Alicia Keys, who she recalls saying, “Go to Columbia, do your thing, go to college, and just keep going.”

During her later years as a student, Latour focused more on songwriting and recording her own “bedroom pop” in her apartment near Columbia, which she shared with three roommates.

Now, the artist said Los Angeles feels like a “fresh start.”

“It’s amazing to be surrounded by people who care as much as I do,” she said, recalling a chance encounter with 26-year-old alt-R&B artist Hope Tala at a coffee shop. “It’s fucking inspiring.”

How LA Shaped Her New Album

Latour said one of her favorite songs on the new album is the one about a car trip from San Diego to Los Angeles.

“We take a road trip, driving south of the bay, and I tell her I’m lonely and I’m in pain,” she sings on track 11, “Infinite Roses.”

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

“When I was recording the album, I was listening to music in cars for the first time, like loud music,” Latour said. “I feel like it changed the way I listened to my demos.”

Now that she lives in Los Angeles, she drives all the time and said that when recording “Sugar Water,” she wanted to capture the feeling of playing one of her songs on the freeway with the windows down.

What’s next?

Latour’s music is driven by lofty hopes for changing the world.

“You can be yourself, you can be anyone you want, it’s all real,” she sings in “Summer of Love,” the fifth track from Sugar Water.

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

“The purpose of music and most art is to keep people energized” and believing that the world can be a better place, she added.

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

He’s going on tour in the fall trip support for pop powerhouse Cari Fletcher, aka FLETCHER. But before that, Latour has plans in L.A. She said she’s hosting a listening party in Silver Lake to celebrate the album’s Friday release — a “Maude DJ rave club night,” she says.

When? Where?

She doesn’t speak.

“I’ll just put the address on the internet and people will find it themselves.”