Sean Leon released his fourth studio album In Loving Memory on December 1, 2023, independently, a 14-track record written in memory of his brother Kingsley, who died in 2020. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Sean Leon In Loving Memory record stands as the most decorated and most personal statement of his career, a grief album built like a film score because it is one.
The album doubles as the soundtrack to House of Leon, a short film directed by Rohan Blair-Mangat and made through Leon’s creative company PUPIL, dedicated to Kingsley. The dedication is not a liner-note gesture. Childhood sounds and family memory run through the sequencing, and the deluxe edition, IN LOVING MEMORY +, followed on December 6, 2024 with eight additional songs, as if the original 14 had not finished saying it.
Sean Leon In Loving Memory Starts From A Demo Called The Glade
The album’s roots reach back to 2019. Leon was in Los Angeles working on Daniel Caesar’s Case Study 01 when fellow collaborator River Tiber suggested he share a demo called “The Glade” with Ye at one of the Sunday Service performances. That demo became “Up From The Ashes” on the deluxe edition of Donda, and the connection opened the biggest writing rooms of Leon’s career: he went on to write on “Selah,” “Jesus Is Lord” and the chorus of “Use This Gospel” for Jesus Is King, and to contribute across Donda and Donda 2.
On In Loving Memory, “The Glade” comes home. Released as a single on June 23, 2023, it pairs Leon with Caesar, the artist he brought into the IXXI Initiative a decade earlier, singing the demo’s resurrection imagery as a duet between the two men who carried it furthest. It is the album’s clearest example of Leon’s catalogue method: nothing wasted, every room he entered sending something back to the house he built.
Fourteen Tracks, A Family Table Of Guests
The guest list reads like the credits of his behind-the-scenes decade, seated at one table: Ye appears on “Oxygen,” Daniel Caesar on “The Glade,” Jessie Reyez on “Dishonored,” River Tiber on “Memories (Reprise),” and Dylan Sinclair on “Memories.” Five singles carried the album in: “Blood” on May 5, 2023, “The Glade” that June, “Equinox” on August 23, 2023, and “Gravity” on September 29, 2023, with a compilation EP gathering the released singles on August 29, 2023 along the way.
“Gravity,” the official video above, is the album’s visual signature: Leon suspended in night rain above a street of open umbrellas, weightless inside the exact force the title names. The album plays in that suspension throughout, moving between alternative hip hop, neo-soul, R&B and gospel without settling, grief given a different tempo on every track. “Kingsley’s Outro” closes the family circle near the end of the deluxe sequencing, the brother the whole record addresses given the near-final word.
The Receipts: Polaris, And A Decade Of Groundwork
In Loving Memory was longlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, the first Polaris recognition of Leon’s career and a notable one: an independently released, self-produced Toronto grief record, judged in the same national field as the year’s major-label statements. The nomination also completed an arc that started in a basement. The IXXI Initiative he founded in 2012 fostered Caesar’s early career; the Caesar partnership produced “Matthew In The Middle” in 2016; the writing rooms that followed produced credits on Grammy-winning and Grammy-nominated albums; and this record is where all of it was finally spent on his own name, in his brother’s memory.
For where that foundation was poured, read iimiTV’s revisit of his debut, I Think You’ve Gone Mad. The distance between the two records is the story: the debut documented a young father building a house, and In Loving Memory is the house, full of everyone he met along the way, holding a memorial in the main room.
How To Hear It Now
Play In Loving Memory in sequence, title track to “Alive,” and let the film-score sequencing do its work: this is an album designed to be watched as much as heard, and the House of Leon film it soundtracks is its other half. Released December 1, 2023, In Loving Memory is Sean Leon’s fourth studio album and his defining one, the record where Toronto’s most connected independent finally put every connection in service of the one person who was not there to hear it.
