Leigh-Anne My Ego Told Me To

Tracks: Look Into My Eyes; Dead and Gone; Revival; Been A Minute; Goodbye Goodmorning; Burning Up; Most Wanted; Best Version Of Me; Me Minus U; Sunrise; You ARE a Star; FREE; Tight Up Skirt; Talk To Me Nice; Heaven

Label: Made In The 90s Ltd

When Leigh-Anne steps into her solo era, she does so with history pressing in from all sides. As the third member of Little Mix to unveil a full-length project, the stakes were never going to be subtle.

Both Perrie Edwards and Jade Thirlwall had already set a commercial benchmark, each reaching Number 3 on the UK Albums Chart, with Jade’s particularly adventurous record earning a wave of critical applause for its left-field daring. In that context, Leigh-Anne’s debut doesn’t just arrive—it asserts.

What makes this moment even more striking is the route she’s taken to get here. Having parted ways with the machinery of a major label, Leigh-Anne emerges as an independent artist with full authorship over her vision. That autonomy pulses through the album’s architecture. It feels expansive, fearless, and—most importantly— self-defined. Rather than chasing chart expectations or echoing what has worked for her bandmates, she builds a world that is unmistakably hers.

Sonically, the record is panoramic. Caribbean rhythms ripple through its foundations, not as aesthetic garnish but as lineage. Her Bajan and Jamaican heritage informs the album’s heartbeat, shaping grooves that lean toward dancehall, reggae, and afrobeats without sacrificing pop precision. There’s warmth in the percussion, elasticity in the basslines, and a looseness that suggests an artist finally exhaling.

Yet to reduce the album to its island influences would be to miss its ambition. The project veers confidently between styles: Sleek R&B confessionals sit alongside percussive club tracks; moments of acoustic vulnerability give way to bold, genre-blurring swings. One track detonates into a snarling, guitar-driven climax that reframes her as a formidable rock presence — a reminder that her voice, long polished within a quartet, has an edge when given the space to roar.

Vocally, this is her most compelling showing to date. There’s a grain in her tone that feels newly foregrounded — less blended, more individual. She plays with phrasing, stretching syllables across syncopated beats, then snapping back into tight melodic control. It’s the sound of someone no longer negotiating for space.

Lyrically, the album grapples with identity, visibility and self-belief. Leigh-Anne has spoken in the past about feeling peripheral within the industry and even within her group; here, she reclaims the narrative without bitterness. There’s a through-line of self-interrogation — examining ego, doubt and ambition — but the record ultimately lands on affirmation. Independence isn’t framed as rebellion for rebellion’s sake; it’s depicted as survival, as necessary evolution.

Importantly, the eclecticism never feels scattershot. Where Jade’s acclaimed project revelled in sharp stylistic pivots and conceptual playfulness, Leigh-Anne’s sprawl feels more emotional than intellectual. The genre shifts mirror lived experience — diasporic heritage, British pop stardom, motherhood, and marriage — all colliding into a mosaic. The cohesion comes from perspective: every detour feeds the same core thesis of self-possession.

Commercially, the shadow of those twin Number 3 peaks looms large. But artistically, Leigh-Anne seems uninterested in simply matching a statistic. The result is an album designed less to compete and more to clarify. Its scale — 15 tracks that swing from sun-drenched rhythms to stormy catharsis — suggests an artist emptying the vault, determined to introduce herself properly rather than strategically.

In doing so, she reframes the narrative of being “the third". There is no sense of catching up here. If anything, the delay has sharpened her. Free from corporate compromise and buoyed by complete creative control, Leigh-Anne delivers a debut that feels both celebratory and corrective — a declaration that her story was never a subplot. It was simply waiting for its own stage.