Being a burgeoning pop star requires a constantly evolving skill set. To the creative uses of social media (pretty much a prerequisite) and the knack for subsisting solely on Greggs’ vegan sausage rolls (it’s so hard to make money off music), we now add the requirement to take crowd selfies on two audience members’ phones at once, in the middle of a preamble to a song about your deepest, scariest thoughts.
South London singer-songwriter Lola Young, 23, is that gen Z multitasker, holding two strangers’ phones aloft as she pivots on stage to catch the crowd in shot. Dodging more devices thrust towards her, she does a second double selfie and catches her breath. “This is a dark one,” she says, “it’s been a hell of a journey.” Intrusive Thoughts, released two weeks ago, is about her schizoaffective disorder, a low-key ballad addressed to the thoughts themselves. Young’s thoughts are thinking about jumping off balconies. “Can’t we just play nicely,” she begs them. During the quietest parts, you can hear two big fans on top of the mixing desk whirring away.
Music has always been an alchemical process, often turning singer-songwriters’ suffering into something beautiful. But we are now firmly into an age where artists of all kinds are opening up about trauma and mental health. Young’s underrated “project” of last year – My Mind Wanders and Sometimes Leaves Completely – owes as much to the tender generational musings of Arlo Parks as it does to Young’s more obvious antecedents.
When Young first emerged around 2020, observers were quick to make the links to Adele and Amy Winehouse. Young is a straight-talking Londoner with a huge voice who writes caustically about tortured relationships; like Adele and Winehouse, she went to the Brit School. Young is signed to Winehouse’s old label, Island, and managed by Nick Shymansky, who managed Winehouse, and Nick Huggett, who signed Adele. (Until Young came along, Shymansky apparently swore he’d never manage another artist after failing to get Winehouse into rehab.)
But a curious thing has happened to this singer, who has also battled cysts on her vocal chords: she seems to have aged in reverse. Young arrived as a relatively polished mainstream artist. In 2021 she was the voice of the John Lewis Christmas ad. So far, so vanilla major label cannon fodder.
She’s younger than that now. In the run-up to My Mind Wanders…, out went the coiffured performances at pianos; in came expletives, face piercings, false eyelashes out to here; what you might call “realness”, if that weren’t such an inexact and slippery term.
On Mind…, a pissed-off and confused young woman delivered a set of songs packed with zingers about sub-par relationships and self-obsessed men. Spiritually, these tracks had a lot in common with CMAT’s excellent album about toxic love, Crazymad, for Me (2023). For context, My 21st Century Blues, Raye’s also very real 2023 album about abuse and faltering mental health, just won its maker six Brit awards.
Many highlights of My Mind Wanders… are on show on this first night of a short UK tour before Young heads to the US and Canada. Among the most poignant are Revolve Around You (“I wish I was easy to love,” sighs Young, listing her faults) and the old-timey doo-wop of What Is It About Me, another song about Young’s too-muchness where her lungs really let rip, like Adele (redux) in a fashion mullet, Fred Perry top and baggy denim shorts.
There’s an actual album coming soon, Young says, but doesn’t say when. Since last autumn, new tracks have trickled out, re-nosing her offering once again. These more recent outings find her four-piece guitar band to the fore, an indie rock sensibility overtaking electronic R&B-ish pop.
The brilliantly blunt Wish You Were Dead came out in January, a spacious clatter of drums and dilatory guitar that describes a kitchen sink drama in two couplets. “We can pretend that we’re in love,” sings Young, “until I throw a punch, you call me a cunt and that tips me over the edge, you throw my phone out the window, and next thing the neighbour says she’s calling the feds.”
These new treatments aren’t always such good news. There’s a slight skank to Big Brown Eyes, an unreleased tune that may charitably recall Lily Allen but doesn’t quite land on first hearing. A couple more unreleased tracks are similarly soupy.
Way more appealing is the 80s pop-rock of Messy, which restates Young’s flaws. They are, in fact, what make her relatable: she smokes “like a chimney”, she’s “not skinny” and she pulls “a Britney every other week”.
There is a slight danger here that Young might just keep reintroducing herself indefinitely with a self-deprecating checklist of defects in which candour might turn into self-flagellation. But all of her wit and front come together magnificently on Conceited, which distils the prowling R&B with guitars, and the ker-ching noises of Arctic Monkeys’s Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High. It builds to a climax, with Young leaping about joyously. She sings it from her gut, half-rapping a lyric in which she gives as good as she gets. It suggests that this is a singer who can handle whatever love – or pop – may throw at her.
Listen to the best new music on the Observer’s Best of 2024 Spotify playlist. Tracks updated weekly by our team of critics.
