While it’s true that more muscle mass requires more calories it also has an impact on your appetite so if you aren’t conscious of what you’re eating you can also gain a lot of fat while gaining muscle. There’s no way around it if you want to look lean you need to balance your diet and eat an appropriate number of calories for your weight and activity level.
The thing is if you get lean without having put on plenty of muscle first, you'll look like a bag of bones, which is neither healthy nor aesthetically pleasing.
You wont look like a bag of bones unless you start to literally starve yourself into underweight levels, like BMI less than 17. Healthy weight people at around BMI 22 don't look like bags of bones, they either have significant amounts of muscle or fat, that is roughly the level where most athletes are so you either have that amount of muscle or the equivalent in fat or somewhere in between.
