Lola Young: “I’ve Gained So Much Perspective And Clarity And Joy”

Lola Young is showing me Polaroids from her Vogue fitting with the giddy energy of a teenage YouTuber doing a haul video. “This is Chanel. That’s Simone Rocha–” She pulls out a shot of herself swaddled to the jawline in mob-wife faux fur. “This one’s Saint Laurent. It’s so expensive. But if this gets put on the cover, I’m definitely going to buy it.” (Guess she’s off to the shops then.)

We’re in her management team’s office, in the crypt of a church on a leafy square near London’s King’s Cross. Amid such ecclesiastical surroundings, the 25-year-old seems almost cartoonishly alive: Tasmanian-devil energy, rock-star charisma, a penchant for swearing. She sits curled up on a sofa, an extra-large Pineapple Ice Lost Mary dangling from her fingers like a cigar. Young is the kind of great British punch-in-the-gut songwriter whose rare talent stands out among her generation. A natural heir to Adele and Amy Winehouse (the latter’s manager, Nick Shymansky, came out of retirement to work with her), Young’s songs don’t so much ask you to feel things as leave you with little choice but to submit, with unfiltered lyrics documenting sex, drugs, bad relationships, as well as ADHD, mental illness and addiction.

Of course, the fallout from that life has been occasional tumult: abandoned performances, breakdowns on stage, rehab stints. It’s fair to say that in a different time, yes, she would have made tabloid front pages; she might have also been mythologised by fans as the very definition of the tortured artist. Today – in an era of macros and sober-maxxing – she is relentlessly under surveillance and picked apart on social media by an audience increasingly used to musicians who live and look like athletes. And yet it was her song “Messy” – an angry, raw single from the south Londoner’s second studio album, This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway – that proved to be her breakthrough hit. In late 2024 you couldn’t open TikTok without seeing Sofia Richie Grainge or Kylie Jenner lip-sync its hook: “I want to be me / Is that not allowed?”

“It’s bigger than me now, out of my control,” says Young today, remembering how she felt when it began to blow up. By 2025, it had been used on more than 1 million TikToks and had more than 300 million streams on Spotify. Young was packing out stages at Glastonbury and Coachella. But it was at the Grammys last February when her career went stratospheric. Perched at a black grand piano, face reflected in its mirror-shiny lid, she performed “Messy” as a devastating ballad. Her first TV performance after taking more than four months off to deal with a period of bad mental health and addiction recovery, it was like seeing life roar back into a person in real time. When cameras cut to the audience, there were tears in Bad Bunny’s and Jennifer Hudson’s eyes. “Lauryn Hill was there, Joni Mitchell – she’s literally my hero,” says Young. She talks quickly and energetically; her husky voice has the same radio-transmitter crackle as when she sings. She won best pop solo performance that night, picking up the prize from industry pal Charli xcx. “Charli looked at me,” she says. “And I was like, ‘No?!’ Carole King gave me a hug after. It just felt like a dream.”

For her manager, it was proof his instinct was right. “After Amy Winehouse, I felt resigned to the fact I’d likely never discover another artist as naturally talented, complex and funny,” says Shymansky. “Twenty years later I met Lola. From as young as 17, it was clear she was an absolute one-off, with a razor-sharp wit and a voice that channels her deepest emotions. It’s an incredible feeling to be so completely certain about how special someone is before they even fully know it. It’s eight years in and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what I know Lola will achieve.”

Since the Grammys, her life has taken on the full superstar sparkle. Young bagged her first Brit for breakthrough artist less than a month later. She played a comeback gig at Brixton Academy, where Adele popped by to say hello, and performed at Elton John’s legendary Oscars party. They FaceTime regularly. “It’s 10 minutes of him saying he loves me and me saying I love him.” He bought you a protective evil eye charm, right? She raises a piercing-studded eyebrow. “He bought me a diamond ring.” Young isn’t exaggerating. “I love everything about Lola,” Elton tells me over email. “I absolutely adore her. I love her personality, her zest for life, her talent, her voice. Everything about her is so infectious and she’s such a loving person. The fact she’s on the cover of Vogue is so great, because she really deserves to be there. She’s a star and I adore her.”

Recent red carpets have seen Young scoot along step-and-repeats in a succession of fab Vivienne Westwood looks: a trinket-covered camo tracksuit, a mesh-swathed Victorian corset dress. She sat front row for the label in Paris in spring, done up like a china doll next to Chappell Roan. “She did this thing where she covered her lips and mine to make sure no one was clocking what we were talking about. And I was like, ‘Yeah, as you fucking should, bitch. Don’t let them post us.’” Andreas Kronthaler, creative director of Vivienne Westwood, says he met Young after the show: “I was struck by her presence and by her aura. I just thought to myself this woman is up to something interesting. She is inspiring.”

Today, Young is dressed in an oversized grey tracksuit, with neon pink Adidas football shoes to match a devil horn-shaped knitted hat that slips off her head when she gets animated. The jagged mullet of the “Messy” era is gone. Instead Old Hollywood waves sit neatly over one shoulder. There’s her signature make-up look: thick fake lashes, dark lip liner, bold blush, all of which she’s wearing today. Make-up is important to her, she says, a creative outlet. She recently wondered, “Do I do it for men?” Then thought: “No! I wore it in Covid when I was wearing a mask. It’s definitely not for anybody else.”

We meet before there’s a new album to hear, but she’s been working on it, in part with singer-songwriter and producer James Blake, and a release date approaches. “Lola is a rare combination of star power, magical ability and a tendency towards rebellion,” says Blake. “That’s what drew me to her and now I get to call her a friend, which is a joy and a privilege.” Expected to drop before the end of the year, it’s more “joyous and reflective” than her past work, says Young. “It still is honest and it’s still, in moments, sad but in a more pretty way.” The change in sound reflects a year of personal transformation. “It’s a change in how I feel about myself. It’s a change in how I feel about my world.” As a result, the music she’s making is “a lot more free”. “I feel so good. I feel really happy.” She pauses to correct herself slightly. “For me, my goal isn’t to be happy. My goal is to be content and feel stable. But happiness is a bonus.”

The place she’s in right now has been hard won. In September last year, Young began to feel “severely burned out”. She had been to rehab twice in 12 months to treat cocaine addiction, writing her third album, I’m Only F**king Myself, in the midst of her struggles, with lyrics including “Spent all day tryna be sober” and “I’ve been tryna quit the snowflake.” “I was hoping that things would change. I wasn’t quite in the space,” she says. As she built up to promoting the album she began to fray. Performing at All Things Go festival in New York, she collapsed mid-set. She posted on Instagram that she was taking a pause from music.

What was it that had led to the burnout? The pressures of fame? Her workload? “A lot of things were going on for me personally. I was working but I also was self-sabotaging and that is not a good combination,” she says. She talks carefully about this time, cautious when she feels she’s about to overshare. “Recovery isn’t linear. It’s a non-stop journey.” She pauses. “I want to say this: there was a lot of hate [online] to people around me, my manager and other people that were in my team.” Commenters suggested they’d been pushing Young too hard. “I’m in control; my team work for me and that’s the truth.” She checked herself into a holistic treatment facility for two months. She was already working with a sober coach but joined Alcoholics Anonymous as well. It was a period of self-reflection. Was it intense? “One hundred per cent,” she replies.

Young was an emo kid. Her mum, a charity worker, and stepdad, a session bassist, wouldn’t let the family have a TV at home in Beckenham, so she’d spend hours and hours playing guitar and listening to Avril Lavigne. (“Can I tell you a crazy story that made me cry?” she interrupts. “I met her at a party [recently]. I have her number. And she said she’d cook me a beef Wellington.”)

How did she find school? “I loved the fact that it was a predominantly Black school and I learned so much about culture. I’m mixed and I’m white-passing.” (Her birth father is Jamaican Chinese. He separated from her mum when she was little.) When it came to actual lessons though? “Wasn’t for me.” She found getting told what to wear and what to do a challenge. As she got older, nights were spent falling out of house parties. She was a heavy weed smoker, using it to numb herself from “a trauma” she’d experienced as a young child. “I was a bit of a rebel.” She pauses. “Cringe! But I also was undiagnosed with ADHD.” When she finally got her diagnosis a couple of years ago, she went on medication. It changed her life. “I got 9/10 in hyperactivity. And I lied on the test.” She said she liked queues. “I hate queues.” Does she get frustrated then, when she reads news stories about the condition being overdiagnosed? “I do think that there’s a slight glamorisation of it,” she says. On social media? “Yeah. I think there’s a little bit of, you know, ‘everyone’s everything’ at the moment.” She pauses then says matter of factly: “But [maybe] everyone is everything.”

She thinks diagnoses are important, she says. Getting one certainly helped a lot with another condition that’s been defining for her: schizoaffective disorder, which she found out that she had at 17. “It’s periods of mania and it’s periods of depression and psychosis,” she explains evenly. How is it at the moment? “I’m very stable. It comes in waves and it’s something I have to constantly battle with.” She is trying to reframe the harder experiences she has with it. “I get to tap into other realms almost. I’ve got to own it.”

By the time Young was 15 she was a regular busker, had won the live talent competition Open Mic UK and appeared in the CBBC show Got What It Takes? (You can still see videos of a baby-faced Young on the show on YouTube, singing with train tracks on her teeth.) It seemed inevitable she would head to Brit School: the free-to-attend but highly selective Croydon secondary that started the career of Winehouse, Adele, Raye, FKA Twigs and others. “I have a specific memory of going to a music studio and thinking, ‘I could literally do this for hours,’” says Young.

Her music hasn’t always been as emotionally high-wire as it is now. Signed by Island Records at 18, there were years of figuring out her sound. She released a few gentler R&B-adjacent singles and a John Lewis Christmas advert cover, which makes her cringe when I bring it up. “I was working with various producers and I was still finding myself. When you don’t have the answers, people will fill in the gaps.” When did she find her own voice? Cutting the mullet, she says. “It was owning change.”

Young moves to sit cross-legged and I notice her hands are covered in tattoos. Barbed wire wraps around her wrist. Hearts, stars and musical notes dot her fingers. There’s a tattoo above her knuckles saying “Everything Ends”. It’s how she feels about the past few years now. At the height of her struggle through her early 20s, she was heading towards an early death, she has said. In 2025, the New York Times ran a piece titled “Can Lola Young Make It Big Without Breaking?” At Coachella that year she was so nervous she became nauseated and gagged on stage. She cancelled a performance at Reading Festival and an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. On stage at All Things Go, before her collapse, she told the crowd: “Sometimes life can really make you feel like you can’t continue, but you know what, today I woke up and I made the decision to come here…”

The period of recovery that followed meant facing all of it head-on. “It’s empowering to open really difficult parts of yourself and just be like, ‘Yeah, I’m a flawed person, but I also can be good.’” Does performing songs from I’m Only F**king Myself bring up emotions from the months building up to a breakdown? “There was a time when I didn’t want to play it, I didn’t want to perform it. And when I started performing, I was like, ‘God, this album is so honest.’ It’s exactly where I was and that’s something I should be proud of.” The first track of Young’s new era came out in September. “From Down Here” – written the day after her Grammy win – captured how it felt to return to public life sober. It’s about missing a high, she says, but also accepting that “this is a better life for me”. Did a part of her worry she wouldn’t be the same person, or artist, without the drugs and the booze? “Definitely,” she says. “Even off the back of the Grammy, I was so elated [but] I was experiencing these feelings that I’d felt a couple of months before: can I still be that person now? Now I know the answer is yes.” She speaks more quietly. “I’ve lost the dark times. I’ve lost the kind of pain and the comedowns and the really excessive big feelings. And I’ve lost being high. But I’ve also gained so much perspective and clarity and joy.”

To say Young’s second act has star support is an understatement. She counts SZA as a fan. Tyler, the Creator is a former collaborator. Having studied at the Brit School at the same time as Olivia Dean, the pair celebrate each other’s wins. After Young opened up about her struggles last year, a sisterhood of pop elders gathered around her. Lady Gaga sent a text to her manager, sharing her number and saying “I’m here to support you.” Paramore’s Hayley Williams sends her voicenotes. She now considers Lily Allen a “good friend”.

Being a famous person in the age of the internet is not for the faint-hearted. Search for Lola Young on TikTok and you meet a barrage of conspiracy theories and criticism. She was called a nepo baby because her great-aunt wrote the children’s book The Gruffalo; an industry plant because she went to the Brit School; people have claimed she’s faking emotion on stage (even her collapse). Her body, her face, her voice are used as fodder for comments-section rants and clout-chasing video essays.

A few days before our interview, videos of Young, tear-streaked and emotional while performing “Spiders”, a track from the album she wrote after rehab, went viral. “There were comments that I saw on TikTok saying, ‘She’s always crying,’” she says. People wrote – again – that her management was pushing too hard. “If I’m emotional on stage, it’s my art, it’s me and it’s my decision.” And she was crying out of joy, something she tells me that she said to fans at the show. “Obviously, [TikTokers] didn’t put it in because people never want to give any context. TikTok does not care about context.” It’s an odd contradiction: the messiness that has become such a defining part of Young’s music is also something the internet seems determined to punish her for. “People will comment on things they would never comment about a man,” she says. “That’s just the truth. Women get so much scrutiny and they get so much hate, and half of the time [it’s from] little men, incels. That’s what it is.” It does hurt her, she says, these negative comments being at her fingertips.

Growing up online in the age of the manosphere is “appalling”, she says. “It’s actually disgusting. There is such a divide and that is pushed between each algorithm.” Men and women? “Yeah, it creates a separation that means that men don’t actually want to see what feminism is truly about because they think it’s about hairy underarms and Bonnie Blue. That’s not what we’re going for, babe.”

I tell her I saw a stat somewhere that said young women’s mental health has got worse over the past 10 years – why does she think this is? “I can only speak for myself and what I go through as a woman. With the rise of social media, and also just constant changes in body standards, with that comes a lot of internal battles.” It’s why she recently posted a TikTok telling people to call it off. “I made a video a long time ago about the same kind of thing; that I didn’t really like when other women, or other people, said that I made them feel confident in their body. Because I don’t need to give you confidence.” She pauses to rethink. “But then I love the fact that I give people confidence to wear what they want, to be who they want to be, because we have to live and die in our bodies, and to be concerned about things like our weight or how we look? There’s literally no point. We’re stuck with it.” Does the return of a super-skinny body standard worry her? “Do you know what? I try to pay no mind to that shit. My algorithm is basically quotes, deep Tumblr quotes. I don’t want to concern myself. Women have enough issues to worry about. We need a fucking pay rise, let alone that.”

Young is at her most animated on a feminist tear. Her older sibling Becky – one of Lola’s three sisters – ran body-positivity events in the 2010s and inspired her growing up. A lot of her songs are about worrying she’s “too much”, she says. “It comes out a lot in my music where I just felt overly confident, overly boisterous. And that’s part of who I am. I have to accept it.” She doesn’t think she’s achieved that yet. “I do feel like I’m way more there than I ever was.”

Is it hard still to be open in her songwriting now she’s super famous? “No. It’s very weird because I don’t see myself from the outside. I’m not going to sit here and go: I feel super famous. I don’t. I feel like me.” A lot of her lyrics are about broken relationships; I wonder: has she ever had someone message after she’s released a song to ask, “Is that me?” A grin crosses her face. “Do you know, they haven’t. I think they know that it’s about them.” She cackles. “As they should!”

Rosalía had a section of her Lux tour where she invited a famous friend on to the stage to make a confession. When Young joined her at the O2 arena this spring, she told a dating horror story. She had just had sex with an older man, whom she thought she was in love with, she said, when he answered a call. “He’s on the phone and his wife is asking him to bring back nappies for his kids… I heard this all on the Bluetooth speaker.” As a result, she said, she was swearing off men and going “back to women”. I wonder if she has a boyfriend or girlfriend now? “I’m seeing various people. I’m shagging.” She flashes me a cheeky look. She doesn’t use dating apps. “I don’t want to do swipe left, swipe right. I just want to meet you and then, if you’re shit, you can go in the bin.” There’s a lot of discourse about Gen Z being scared of intimacy. Do you think that’s true? “I’m not!” Her last great kiss was just a few days ago, she says. What’s her biggest ick? “I hate when people have fears,” she says.

She has a series of questions she runs through when she meets people. “I ask them, ‘Do you like roller-coasters?’ If they say no, they’re in the bin. ‘Do you like horror films?’ That is an ick for me if you can’t sit and watch one.” Dating isn’t the hellscape people make it out to be, she says. “It’s exaggerated. I think love still exists and I wouldn’t have said that a couple of years ago. It changes depending on where you are in your life.”

And life is pretty balanced right now for Young. There are practical things she’s put in place to maintain that: more intimate gig venues, more asking for help from friends and family, more focus on her physical health. She’s doing weightlifting sessions with a PT. She grimaces. “Fuck me, it’s hard. How do people do it? I don’t do it for any other reason than feeling the endorphin high that lasts about six hours.”

Last summer, she bought her first house, here in London. She has been decorating it herself. She’s got a big grand piano, she says, and lots of boob-shaped vases. She bought her granddad – a poet and anarchist she describes as the most important person in her life – a place recently too. “Now he’s paying me rent. I want to redo it and make it cute. When he passes, I might make it into a studio.”

She sees as much of her friends as she can. Is that hard as her life reaches an ever more intense pitch? “I make time. Trust me, I’ve got ADHD, I never want to be sitting bored, so everyone’s getting seen.” She has also recently tried to read a bit more. “I gave Sapiens another go. Got about two pages in.” When she’s travelling for work she’ll go vintage shopping for streetwear. Berlin and Los Angeles are her favourite cities for that.

A week after we speak she’ll return to New York to play the All Things Go festival – where she collapsed last year. It’s a deliberate choice, she says: a back-on-the-horse reckoning of sorts. “There’s definitely still anxiety about it,” she says. “I’m definitely thinking about how important it is for me to show people that I am healthy. I think it’s about proving [it] to myself as well.” She’s excited about the future, she says: making more music, performing more shows. Recently, she got the words “so far, so good” tattooed on her knees. “I’ve been through a lot and I’ve had lots to face,” she says. She flashes me a knowing smile. “But it’s not been too bad.”