“Messy” wasn’t just a hit single for Lola Young; it was also a manifesto. The bratty pop-rock song that dominated TikTok in late 2024 and early 2025 documents the British singer’s inner dialogue as she chafes against impossibly high standards. “A thousand people I could be for you, and you hate the fucking lot,” Young rasps in her defiant south London twang, alternately belting and gently teasing out the line. It’s spiky yet wounded, capturing the turbulence of a toxic relationship in full swing. Young wrote her third album, I’m Only Fucking Myself, during the song’s unexpected meteoric rise (in January this year, it was the most-streamed song by a British artist in the world) and a stint in rehab. Here, she leans further into her commitment to warts-and-all pop music, producing several songs that feel just as arresting as her viral moment.
Though “Messy” seems addressed to a critical partner or parent, you could also read Young’s bristling self-ownership through the lens of her career: the long road of publicly carving out her identity as a musician after having been discovered as a teenager. She graduated from the BRIT School in 2018, a selective but free specialist school for music and performing arts, notably attended by the likes of Adele, Amy Winehouse, and RAYE. Soon afterwards, she caught the attention of Nick Shymansky, Winehouse’s former manager, and Nick Huggett, who signed Adele. Both signed up to her management team (Shymansky is still her manager today); the following year, she inked a deal with Island Records.
Her first releases were downbeat, soulful singles that seemed to play to the masses. In 2021, she even completed the British hazing ritual of recording a tear-streaked piano cover of a vintage pop song for department store John Lewis’s annual Christmas advert. But by her breakthrough 2024 record This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway, she’d developed a disarming candor—she’s described it as learning “to write as if I was speaking to somebody,” a quality she sharpens on I’m Only Fucking Myself.
The record documents a life in chaotic transition, including Young’s recovery from cocaine addiction—a non-linear journey that doesn’t rest on feel-good affirmations or straightforward resolution, but unblinkingly faces both the highs and the lows. The album’s first full track is the anthemic “FUCK EVERYONE,” an indie-sleaze ode to casual sex and hedonism, before breaking into a strut with the psychedelic-tinged funk of “One Thing.” Although anxieties about exposure and self-hatred cling to the lyrics like shadows, the songs’ production—shaped by Solomonophonic (SZA, Remi Wolf)—fosters a no-strings-attached, devil-may-care breeziness before the album careens into darker territory.
