“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.

The comedown is brutal, with Young at her most raw as she writes about avoidance and addiction. On “CAN WE IGNORE IT? :(,” over a spider’s web of listless guitar distortion, she begs for oblivion before the chorus surges with desperation: “If you love me like you say,” she sings, “You’ll let me escape.” The album’s jewel in the crown, “d£aler,” scans on the surface as a pared-back ’80s pop song, but pulsates with a self-destructive yearning to skip town and get high. Throughout the record, Young’s voice is an emotional powerhouse, whether she’s screaming her throat red on the grunge-rock ballad “SPIDERS” or tenderly whisper-crooning on the twangy “why do i feel better when i hurt you?”

Young’s chatty style, though, can sometimes feel a little too unvarnished. That lack of censorship is part of her appeal, but it allows clunky lines like “I like a dopamine hit more than a fat kid loves cake” to slip through the net on the otherwise raucous and sunny “Not Like That Anymore.” Then there’s the tautologically titled “SAD SOB STORY! :),” which berates an ex for not processing their anger in therapy via overstuffed, diaristic verses. Young is stronger when she turns her lens on herself, as on the forlorn “why do i feel better…,” which offers a necessarily vulnerable counterpoint to the rest of the album’s full-throttle fuck-you.

There’s something nostalgic about Young, who feels much closer in spirit to the outspoken rebellion of Winehouse or Lily Allen than the puritanical, sober, “clean girl” stereotype of her generation. “d£aler,” with its funk rhythm, certainly feels timeless and bare-faced enough that it could be her own “Smile” or “Rehab.” Perhaps the character she’s portraying—the authentic, potty-mouthed pop starlet who subverts the formula—is nothing new; perhaps by now, it’s even become its own kind of formula. But I’m Only Fucking Myself arrives against a backdrop of pristine pop like a cannonball, cracking the veneer of our sanitized and pearl-clutching cultural moment with refreshing honesty and messiness.