The title itself is a perfect example: what began as a playful nickname from fans becomes, in Leandra Earl’s hands, both a confession and a coronation. She doesn’t reject the label, but she also doesn’t treat it as a joke. Instead, she turns it into something deeply human, giving it weight and meaning through her vulnerability.
This act of reframing echoes across contemporary queer art. We’ve seen it recently in Khalid’s own reflections, as he opened up about his sexuality and spoke candidly about the pressure of labels versus the freedom of self-definition. Similarly, artists like Lil Nas X have reclaimed tropes of hyper-masculinity and homophobia in rap.
‘Lesbian of the Year’ doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s the product of a journey, a culmination of themes The Beaches have been steadily been building across their recent releases. When placed alongside tracks ‘Touch Myself,’ ‘Did I Say Too Much,’ and ‘Last Girls at the Party,' the single reads less like a one-off confession and more like the emotional centrepiece of a single that confronts vulnerability, self-questioning, and the messiness of fame head-on.
Each of these songs wrestles with exposure, with the fear and thrill of revealing too much. In ‘Touch Myself’ the band embraces a kind of shameless intimacy, where vulnerability meets desire. The lyric “I touch myself to remember I’m real” reframes pleasure not as something secretive or indulgent, but as a way of asserting presence. ‘Did I Say Too Much’ is its’ anxious counterpart, that spiral after laying your truth bare, “Why did I speak too soon. I let my guard down, yeah I trusted you”. ‘Last Girls at the Party’ lingers in the loneliness that can accompany fame, where being seen by everyone can still leave you feeling utterly unseen, “Everyone’s watching, but nobody knows me”.
Together, these singles create a narrative arc of questioning and exposure. They trace the steps of someone trying to piece themselves together in the glare of public life, caught between the need to perform, the desire to connect, and the fear of being misunderstood. That’s what makes this collection so powerful. These aren’t just songs about parties, lust, or heartbreak, they’re snapshots of queer artists navigating the emotional contradictions of fame and identity in real time.
‘Lesbian of the Year’ is more than a single, it’s a public act of reframing, one that mirrors the very heart of queer culture.