Early life

Lewis Pierre Simon Delhomme^[1] is from Paris,^[2] and has two siblings, Camille and Joseph,^[3] who are much older than him.^[4] His father, Jean-Philippe Delhomme,^[5] is an artist who created a series of advertisements for Barneys New York in the 1990s,^[6] his uncle, Benoît Delhomme, was a cinematographer who worked on the Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, their grandfather, Georges Delhomme,^[7] helped create Lancôme and spent 29 years with the firm,^[8] and Lewis' mother, Sophie-Anne,^[3] spent time as the artistic director of Courrier International.^[9] Growing up, he wanted to be a perfumer, but found it too mathematical,^[10] and spent much of his childhood on Sophie-Anne's phone, which contained a number of video games, including a rudimentary digital audio workstation. He then spent a period in New York,^[4] at which, aged eleven,^[11] he learned to play the drums; upon his return to Paris, he became the drummer for a band,^[4] the Jools,^[11] before buying himself a keyboard the following year.^[12] He then began composing works on Sophie-Anne's iPad using GarageBand,^[13] and his first EP, the Bandcamp-exclusive Disconsolate, was produced using the software.^[12]

Career

Delhomme adopted the Lewis OfMan moniker around 2014;^[12] SoundCloud had asked him what his artist name was, and he remembered his brother was playing a soccer video game in which his surname appeared in Spanish as "Del Hombre", which translated into English as "Of Man".^[4] That year, he released his second EP, Yo Bene,^[12] and later that year, he produced Vendredi sur Mer's debut album Marée Basse.^[14] In 2021, he released another EP, Dancy Party,^[15] and the following year he released "Misbehave", a collaboration with Coco & Clair Clair, which Billboard likened to a version of Kesha's "Tik Tok" shot in the Emily in Paris universe; the song appeared on Delhomme's album Sonic Poems, which was released the same day^[16] and was co-produced with Tim Goldsworthy, and contained eighteen voice notes.^[13] He then released the single "Nails Matching My Fit" featuring Shanae, and in July 2022, he released "Move Me", a collaboration with Carly Rae Jepsen, who had discovered Delhomme in September 2020 after a friend sent her a playlist; in an October 2022 interview with Paper, Delhomme stated that he wrote the song while living in Florence after spending a "special night" with someone, and that he wrote the track the day before a session with Jepsen.^[17] In February 2023, Delhomme supported Jensen on several shows on her The So Nice Tour.^[18]

In October 2022, he released a remix of Superorganism's "On & On", which later appeared on World Wide Pop – Reeeemix!, a remix album containing tracks from the band's World Wide Pop.^[19] In June 2023, Delhomme released "Highway", a collaboration with Empress Of, alongside a music video shot in Los Angeles and directed by Écoute Chérie, Delhomme's visual collaborator. The song came about after Delhomme met Of in Los Angeles, set up a session with her, and used it to burn off a demo he had started while on holiday in Greece while listening to the psychedelic rock he was listening to as a teenager and 1970s Brazilian music such as Jorge Ben and Quarteto em Cy.^[20] In November 2023, he released "Hey Lou", which Delhomme had also written in Greece, and which was a collaboration with Parisian singer Camille Jansen, with whom Delhomme had previously worked on her Louise EP in 2019; the song sampled a choir, as Delhomme was listening to Leonard Cohen's "So Long, Marianne" and Death of a Ladies' Man at the time, and was released alongside a music video shot by Pierre Auroux at Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.^[21]