Lenka Eden Kripac is an Australian singer-songwriter and actress best known for her song “The Show”, from her debut album, Lenka. The daughter of Czechoslovak jazz trumpet musician Jiří Křipač and Eden, an Australian schoolteacher, Lenka was raised in the Australian coastal town of Bega until age seven, when her family moved to Sydney. There she received her schooling, acting and music training, and started to work as a highly regarded theatre actress and later musician.
As a teenager, Lenka studied acting at the Australian Theate for Young People, where she trained with actress Cate Blanchett. Lenka starred in the Australian ABC-TV drama series GP as Vesna Kapek in the 1990s. She also hosted Cheez TV and has guest starred in other Australian TV series, including Home and Away, Wildside, Head Start and Spellbinder. She appeared in Australian feature films The Dish and Lost Things, as well as in theatre productions. Lenka provided the vocals for two tracks on Paul Mac’s 2005 album Panic Room, including its title track. She also served a member of the Australian electronic-rock crossover band Decoder Ring for two of their albums between 2004 and 2005. She then moved to California in 2007.
After adopting her first name as her sole artistic name, Lenka released her eponymous debut album in September 2008, with “The Show” (produced by Stuart Brawley) chosen to be the first single release from the set. The album peaked at number 142 on the US Billboard. Her song “Everything at Once” was featured in a Windows 8 ad, becoming a worldwide success. Lenka creates paper art type stop-motion animated music videos for each of her singles with her husband James Gulliver Hancock, a visual artist from Australia, for a deliberately childlike effect. She provided vocals on two tracks (“Addicted” and “Sunrise”) on German artist Schiller’s album Atemlos, released in Germany in March 2010.
In 2011, Lenka released her second album Two which was inspired by her engagement and is full of romantic love songs. Despite a warm critical reception, the album failed to match the success of her debut album, with Two reaching peak chart positions of 69 and 88 on the Belgian and Swiss charts respectively. Her third album Shadows was released in 2013, following the birth of her son.
Lenka’s fourth studio album The Bright Side, was released in 2015 and the most featured single in this album became “Blue Skies”. A remix version of the song, released on the YouTube remix channel Trap Nation, has over 30 million views on YouTube. Her fifth studio album, Attune, was released in 2017 and contains the track “Heal”, which was created in cooperation with Australian singer and author Sally Seltmann. Her most played songs on BBC are “All My Bells Are Ringing”, “We Will Not Grow Old”, “Everything at Once”, “Don’t Let Me Fall”, and “Trouble is a Friend”. In 2023, Lenka released her sixth studio album, Intraspectral.
