Leon Thomas was Young Simba on Broadway before he was ten, then Andre on Nickelodeon's Victorious through his teens — a full decade of child-actor work before most people knew he could write songs at all. That skill was there the whole time: he was already a key collaborator on Ariana Grande's platinum debut Yours Truly in 2013, then spent years as half of the production duo The Rascals, writing and producing for Drake, SZA, Rick Ross, and Toni Braxton, largely uncredited to the wider public.
'Snooze,' the SZA song he co-wrote, won him Best R&B Song at the 67th Grammys — the first real public acknowledgment of the writing career he'd been quietly building. MUTT, his own 2024 album, picked up multiple nominations at the 2026 Grammys, including Best Progressive R&B Album, which puts him in the strange position of being nominated for his own music years after already winning for someone else's.