Most debut albums clock in under an hour and try to make every second sound expensive. Levandovski went the other way. Her first record, Levandovski’s Let Me Overwhelm You, runs 27 tracks and an hour and 28 minutes, and most of the vocals haven’t been tuned or sweetened. That’s the point.
The 21-year-old composer released the album on May 25, 2026, and it carries the kind of scope you usually associate with artists three records deep. She modeled it after The Beatles’ White Album, which explains the sprawl, the genre-hopping, and the willingness to follow whatever idea shows up next. There’s rock on here. There’s pop. There’s jazz. Nothing sits in one place long enough to get comfortable.
The lo-fi quality isn’t a budget constraint dressed up as aesthetic. Levandovski has been writing at a collegiate level for years, with around 30 premieres at university concerts before she decided to release independently. She’s composed for Mendelssohn Chorus PA and the Temple University New Music Ensemble, and she’s arranged work for vocalist and conductor Ruth Naomi Floyd and Emmy-winning writer Andrea Green. She could have polished this album. She didn’t want to.
“The music on my album is extremely bare-bones and authentic,” she says. “I do not pretend to be a big-budget act with a recording studio and dozens of people cleaning up my vocals. I come from a background of live, unsweetened music, and I wanted my album to reflect this.”
The editing went into volume balancing, not pitch correction. The track “Blinding” stacks seven unedited vocal tracks in melodic unison, and she considers it one of the most fulfilling listens on the record. It’s the kind of arrangement that would normally get smoothed out by a producer’s instinct toward symmetry. Here it stays jagged.
Her musical influences explain the writing approach more than they explain the sound. Levandovski credits The Beatles, Billy Joel, and Cy Coleman for getting her through the album. What she takes from them isn’t a style. It’s a discipline. “I prioritize writing with intention,” she explains, “tailoring every lyric to flow and deliver meaning, every melody to match the words while conveying effective musicality, and every chord to connect to the next in subversive perfection.” Coleman is the giveaway. That’s a Broadway pedigree showing through, and it tracks with her work as a playwright.
She started writing during the COVID pandemic, while homeschooling, after live acting opportunities dried up. Four years of trial and error later, she was getting her work performed at university concerts. The album captures where she lands at 21, not where she’s headed.
Levandovski’s work centers queer, neurodivergent, Jewish, and POC representation, with particular attention to vocal music for marginalized performers and ensemble settings that accommodate underrepresented voice types. Levandovski’s Let Me Overwhelm You is openly sapphic, and she hopes it gives listeners outside the community a window in, and listeners inside the community something familiar to recognize themselves in. “I hope my album also gives insight into queer life,” she says, “both for folks outside the community and those who are newly discovering their queer identity.”
The most personal track might be “All But Me,” Track 13 on the album. She wrote it about her mental health struggles in 2024. The “growing ill” in the lyrics refers to an imminent depression diagnosis and the thoughts she was having before seeking treatment. The behaviors that came out of that period, and the damage they did to her relationships, drive the narrative of the song.
“All But Me” pulls from early Beatles, which makes sense once you hear it. The honesty doesn’t read as confessional in the way singer-songwriter records usually do. It reads as someone who learned how to write a song before she learned how to perform her own pain. That’s a different relationship to vulnerability, more architectural than diaristic, and it gives the track a strange durability.
The album doesn’t have a defining genre, and Levandovski isn’t apologizing for that. She wants listeners to leave humming at least one melody well enough to come back for the rest. That’s the Beatles ambition again, the idea that an album should be a place you visit repeatedly, not a single you stream once and forget.
Up next, she’s recording an audio drama of her autobiographical Autism musical, “The Story Nobody Can Tell,” scheduled for January. A post-album single called “That Was Your Mistake” is coming later this summer. Both projects continue what the album started: work made by and for people who don’t usually get the microphone, written with the technical care of someone who studied this stuff seriously and then decided to do it her own way anyway.
For a debut, Levandovski’s Let Me Overwhelm You makes an unusual bet. Most newcomers try to prove they can compete with major-label production. Levandovski instead trusts that her songwriting can carry the weight without it, and trusts listeners to meet her in the rawness. It’s a bet that pays off the longer you sit with it. After 88 minutes, the rawness stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the only way the album could have worked.
You can find Levandovski’s Let Me Overwhelm You on Spotify, follow Levandovski on Instagram, and learn more about her composition and theatrical work at her website.
