Music

When Lola Young is on stage, all eyes in the room drift toward her like iron filings to a magnet. Look closely at online footage from the south Londoner’s recent North American tour, and you’ll notice hundreds of people crying, headbanging, screaming – enjoying moments of release, letting go of inhibitions with abandon. Young matches their energy, growling and belting her lyrics as though she’s feeling the pain of her songs for the very first time.

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Each time the 23-year-old performs live – she’s completed two stateside treks this year, and has dates in the U.K., Europe and Australia booked through early 2025 – she shares an emotional exchange with the crowd. After coming off the road last month, having played dozens of headline shows plus festivals such as Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza Chicago, the first thing Young did was “cry a lot,” as she told her 620,000 TikTok followers in a recent post.

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“I know you’re not my therapist,” she jokes to Billboard over a video call, “but it’s important to be honest and say that I’ve felt quite low. Leaving tour is like a big comedown. After being so active by performing my heart out every night and receiving so much love, it’s quite hard to adjust to reality again. It’s been difficult, but I am getting there – I’m on my way up.”

Young’s smoky voice and catalog of witty, elastic pop songs speak to something deep within her fanbase. There are the devotees who mimic her blush-heavy makeup, as well as the more casual listeners who have created so many clips featuring the glorious single “Messy” that her Spotify streams have increased tenfold in recent weeks, which, at the time of writing, currently stands at 12.7 million monthly listeners. Her debut LP This Wasn’t Meant for You Anyway, released in June via Island Records, was characterized by its brutal honesty: “I can dance in the mirror and feel seen without being watched by someone / Especially not no ugly man, or woman,” so goes its spoken-word outro.

Even with her camera off, Young stays true to form throughout our conversation. She laughs a lot. She swears a lot. She says “f–k” in nearly every sentence, eager to emphasize that she’s still coming to terms with how dizzying the past few months have been. Having chased her dreams since she started writing songs at 11, she’s now moved beyond ravenous early career ambition and is eyeing a new level of global superstardom.

“What I’m realizing about myself as an artist is that I’m not about the glitz and the glam — I don’t scream ‘Hollywood’,” she says. “For a long time, I wanted to represent this ideal of Westernized beauty – but then I realized I’m not that. I now choose to give realness and truth. I’ve got a bit of a belly out, I f–cking swear a bunch and I have fun. And that’s what people are resonating with.”

Young is dialing in from Paris, where she is in the studio already working on her next project. She has leveraged a tireless, laser-focused work ethic into an ascendant career: Beginning with 2023’s My Mind Wanders and Sometimes Leaves project, in the past 18 months she has drip-fed a slew of extended releases and one-off singles (from “Flicker of Light” to recent Lil Yachty team-up “Charlie”). This Wasn’t Meant for You Anyway comprised entirely new material, while her unique, wildly popular live performance clips have introduced her to a global audience via social media. With a vintage mic to hand, she has done everything from getting kicked out of a London Underground station to dancing gleefully in front of the Golden Gate bridge. 

It’s this industrious spirit that has caught the attention of some of contemporary music’s most revered names. In the summer, Young briefly hit the studio and shared egg rolls with SZA, who regularly leaves flame emojis on her Instagram posts. “This is insane and I live for it,” commented the “Kill Bill” singer when Young shared the news of “Like Him,” her stunning feature on Tyler, the Creator’s recent Billboard 200-topping LP Chromakopia. 

The rapper had previously praised Young via DM, and when he messaged asking if she would contribute vocals to his song, her response was an immediate, resounding yes. “When I first heard [Tyler’s] ‘Yonkers’, it totally changed the way I viewed music,” she adds. 

Young’s gorgeously subtle, stirring delivery during the chorus heightens the song’s poignant mood, a meditation on complex familial bonds. “Like Him” peaked at No. 29 on the Billboard 100, further cementing Young’s fast-growing stature in the U.S: in October, she performed at L.A.’s 1,600-capacity Bellwether concert hall, twice the size of her April gig at the city’s Echoplex venue. 

Young’s journey is a lesson in how, for newer artists, being given the space and time to find their footing can result in truly fresh, singular music. Yet her transatlantic success hasn’t come without its qualms. To an extent, she remains unfairly associated in some listeners’ minds with the commercial balladry of her early days, as well as the cover of Philip Oakley and Giorgio Moroder’s “Together in Electric Dreams” she recorded for the British retailer John Lewis’ 2021 Christmas advert. At age 16, she was a shy but ambitious finalist on the now-defunct reality television competition Got What It Takes.

“A lot of strings were being pulled when I was starting out. It all felt fake. It felt forced,” she says. Notably, in her live sets, she doesn’t perform any material from her 2019 EP Intro or its follow-up, Renaissance. “This isn’t about blaming anybody, but nothing was really clicking at the time. Now, I have creative control alongside an understanding of who I am and where I want to go.”

Young has survived her own trials in selfhood. Her anxieties, frustrations and pride now fuel her music. She says the light-bulb moment arrived when she started rocking a mullet two years ago, a look that has boosted her confidence “massively”. She has since explored themes of identity and self-destruction in her work, recovered from an operation on her vocal cords and spoken about her schizoaffective disorder diagnosis on Instagram. 

When she talks about these experiences, Young affirms that she abides by the old adage that small actions can lead to big changes in one’s life. “I kept holding faith in the fact that if I cut my hair, the music would follow” she says, evidently thrilled that her own prophecy came true.