Label Look: How Leo33 Took Zach Top to Breakout Chart Success – Billboard

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
Read More