Courtesy of Leo33
Few artists fib as sweetly as Zach Top. On breakout hit “I Never Lie,” he sings about his life as a model citizen — an unfailingly punctual teetotaler who always gets a full night’s rest and remains impervious to heartbreak. It’s only at the end of the chorus that the illusion is shattered. “I wish I could say I miss you,” Top croons. “But you know I never lie.” The last falsehood is impossible to believe, and the rest of them fall like dominoes.
“I Never Lie,” which sounds like it could have been released in Nashville in the 1980s — maybe around 1987, when George Strait turned his own series of fibs into the hit single “Ocean Front Property” — cracked the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in September. It has climbed the chart at a stately pace, peaking at No. 24 in May, an impressive accomplishment for Top — and for Leo33, the fledgling independent label who made the singer their first signing in the summer of 2023.
“We knew that he was an important signing for us for a lot of reasons,” Katie Dean, label head at Leo33, says of Top. “We had a great plan, and Zach is absolutely a once in a lifetime kind of artist. But you can hope and dream — to have the audience react this way has been unbelievable. And to have the success with him that we’ve had has also helped put our stamp on, ‘These are the kinds of artists that we want to sign.’”
Dean spent close to two decades at labels in the Universal Music Group family, specializing in radio promotion, before helping to launch Leo33 in April 2023. Like many veterans of the majors who transition to the independent sector — and some veterans who are still working at the majors — she worries that the artist development process has “fallen to the wayside” as those companies prioritize “picking up what’s popping and running with it.”
“Majors are sort of designed to do high volume: It’s signing a lot of artists and taking a lot of shots,” Dean says. “I wanted to be in an environment where we could really focus and know everybody who was touching the project at any given time, rather than walking into a boardroom where there’s a bunch of new faces from week to week.”
Dean joined Universal Music Group in 2005, eventually rising to senior vp of promotion at MCA Records Nashville. During that time, she worked with George Strait, Reba McEntire, Taylor Swift, Sam Hunt and Kacey Musgraves, among others. Her resume was part of the reason Top signed with Leo33. “It meant a good bit to me that Katie Dean had worked on a bunch of records that had made me fall in love with country music,” he told Billboard last year.
She launched Leo33 along with Rachel Fontenot, former vp of marketing and artist development at UMG Nashville; Daniel Lee, former president of artist development company Altadena; and Natalie Osborne, former Downtown Music Nashville senior creative director. Leo nods to the constellation of the same name; Fontenot said in 2023 that it was meant to signify lion-like traits, namely courage and agility. (She left a few months after the label was born.)
At a time when labels who have not previously shown interest in country music are storming into Nashville, a newcomer needs to be able to offer competitive advances. Leo33 has backing from Firebird and Red Light Ventures, which provide “fantastic resources and additional marketing support,” according to Dean. Firebird, which has invested in labels, management companies and publishers, also serves as Leo33’s distribution partner, as well as “another voice” advocating for the label’s artists at the streaming services.
Dean promises singers plenty of direct attention. “We are all on group texts with each of the artists, so anyone is available at any point,” she says. On top of that, “We don’t have the luxury as a new label to rely on 30 years of catalog. Success is the only option.”
That hunger appealed to Top. He was being pursued by other record companies, but “the fact that [Leo33 executives] are all veterans in this industry and they are trying this new [label], it feels like they are at square one again just as much as I am and have everything to prove,” he said.
Osborne, an A&R executive at Leo33, had gone to Whiskey Jam in Nashville to see another act when she stumbled on a performance by Top, a bluegrass artist turned country singer. She played his music at the Leo33 office the next morning before setting out to find Top’s manager.
Dean was also “immediately smitten” by what she heard. “He made the kind of music that made me fall in love with this format,” she says. And Leo33 executives believed “there is an audience of people who are craving that kind of music,” precisely because it has been out of favor in the country mainstream.
Top co-wrote his debut album, Cold Beer & Country Music, with Carson Chamberlain, who had a hand in No. 1 hits for legends like Strait and Alan Jackson. Leo33 picked the uptempo dance number “Sounds Like the Radio” — which references Jackson in its very first couplet — as the lead single. It serves as a manifesto of sorts: “It sounds like the radio/ Back in ’94, ya know.”
Roughly three months after releasing “Sounds Like the Radio,” when it was hovering just inside the top 40 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart, Top put out the rest of his album. “With most major labels, that would not have been the case,” Dean explains. “It would have been, ‘Wait for multiple singles to come out, wait for enough of a consumption threshold to be met.’ But we all felt really strongly internally that if somebody discovered Zach, they would want to discover more than a few songs.”
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Their faith was rewarded when listeners started to gravitate to “I Never Lie,” streaming it and using it in TikTok videos. The album’s other high points include “Bad Luck,” which plays like a sequel to “I Never Lie,” where the protagonist finally catches a break; and “Use Me,” a slow-burn ballad about a one-night stand.
The rest of Leo33’s roster includes Jenna Paulette, who lives on a working ranch in Texas and shares Top’s appreciation for fiddle and pedal steel guitars; Jason Scott & the High Heat, whose ramshackle rock sprouts with sweet harmonies; Ashland Craft, who favors a rugged country sound; and a fifth signing that the company hasn’t yet announced.
In addition to reaching the top 25 on the Hot 100, “I Never Lie” peaked at No. 2 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart in May. Top’s catalog has earned 798,000 equivalent album units to date in the U.S., according to Luminate, including 963.9 million on-demand streams.
Leo33 now has eight full-time employees. In March, Ana Shabeer joined as director, business intelligence; and Joseph Manzo started as a marketing coordinator.
Jason Scott & the High Heat put out American Grin in March, and Ashland Craft just released her debut album on Leo33, Dive Bar Beauty Queen. Top will follow Cold Beer & Country Music with Ain’t In It For My Health on August 29. The lead single, “Good Times & Tan Lines,” was promptly put into rotation by 50 country radio stations, making it the most added track of the week in the format.
