“Messy” wasn’t only a hit single for Lola Younger; it was additionally a manifesto. The bratty pop-rock music that dominated TikTok in late 2024 and early 2025 paperwork the British singer’s inside dialogue as she chafes towards impossibly excessive requirements. “A thousand folks I may very well be for you, and also you hate the fucking lot,” Younger rasps in her defiant south London twang, alternately belting and gently teasing out the road. It’s spiky but wounded, capturing the turbulence of a poisonous relationship in full swing. Younger wrote her third album, I’m Solely Fucking Myself, throughout the music’s sudden meteoric rise (in January this yr, it was the most-streamed music by a British artist on this planet) and a stint in rehab. Right here, she leans additional into her dedication to warts-and-all pop music, producing a number of songs that really feel simply as arresting as her viral second.
Although “Messy” appears addressed to a important accomplice or guardian, you could possibly additionally learn Younger’s bristling self-ownership by way of the lens of her profession: the lengthy highway of publicly carving out her id as a musician after having been found as a youngster. She graduated from the BRIT College in 2018, a selective however free specialist college for music and performing arts, notably attended by the likes of Adele, Amy Winehouse, and RAYE. Quickly afterwards, she caught the eye of Nick Shymansky, Winehouse’s former supervisor, and Nick Huggett, who signed Adele. Each signed as much as her administration workforce (Shymansky continues to be her supervisor in the present day); the next yr, she inked a cope with Island Information.
Her first releases had been downbeat, soulful singles that appeared to play to the lots. In 2021, she even accomplished the British hazing ritual of recording a tear-streaked piano cowl of a classic pop music for division retailer John Lewis’s annual Christmas advert. However by her breakthrough 2024 report This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway, she’d developed a disarming candor—she’s described it as studying “to jot down as if I used to be chatting with any person,” a top quality she sharpens on I’m Solely Fucking Myself.
The report paperwork a life in chaotic transition, together with Younger’s restoration from cocaine habit—a non-linear journey that doesn’t relaxation on feel-good affirmations or easy decision, however unblinkingly faces each the highs and the lows. The album’s first full observe is the anthemic “FUCK EVERYONE,” an indie-sleaze ode to informal intercourse and hedonism, earlier than breaking right into a strut with the psychedelic-tinged funk of “One Factor.” Though anxieties about publicity and self-hatred cling to the lyrics like shadows, the songs’ manufacturing—formed by Solomonophonic (SZA, Remi Wolf)—fosters a no-strings-attached, devil-may-care breeziness earlier than the album careens into darker territory.