L!KA grew up in Toronto and is now based in NYC, and she describes herself as an emotional pop singer songwriter. Her catalogue has passed 82,690 streams across all platforms, with ‘Help You Stand’ alone over 30k on Spotify. Those figures are the honest kind, built one listener at a time. What I find most telling is where a share of them come from: Release Radar and Discover Weekly, which only keep surfacing an artist when people who heard her once chose to stay. Her placements stretch from TOP HITS 2026 to 2000s Disney Channel Hits, and the second makes sense when you know who she draws on. Demi Lovato and Kelly Clarkson are among the names she gives, singers who built careers on choruses you could lean your whole weight against, and that lineage is audible in how she uses her voice.
She has been on stages since the age of two, moving from television into live music, playing El Mocambo and Supermarket Bar in Toronto. She also founded and organised Unmuted, a Toronto showcase for independent artists. That detail stays with me. An artist still finding her own audience chose to build a platform for other people’s music as well, which suggests someone who thinks about listeners as a community rather than a count.
Her new single, ‘Talk To Me’, arrives on 10 November, and it was written in the last hour of a silence that followed an row, before she knew whether her half a decade relationship would last. It opens on piano then widens into a big chorus where “You are the one I chose, please call right now” sounds less like a lyric than a message typed and left unsent.
She tells the story behind it with some lightness now. “If you don’t talk to me for 23 hours, don’t be surprised when I have a whole song about it by hour 24,” she says. “I guess that’s the upside of dating a songwriter.” The couple worked things out, and she is glad the song kept the feeling of not yet knowing.
Her music has also had airplay on EJazz Radio, which carries her beyond the playlist ecosystem and into the older habit of a voice coming through the speakers. The next step points the same way. Late in November 2026, she intends to launch her own podcast, aimed at bringing listeners closer to the person behind the music, with candid conversations about her everyday life and the way she thinks. For an artist whose audience has gathered through recommendation and chance, offering people somewhere to get to know her feels like a natural move.