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Given the number of pop stars who have been open about their issues with drug addiction, it’s surprising there aren’t more songs about breaking up with dealers. So hats off to Lola Young for owning her mixed feelings over the arcade game beat of “D£aler”, the third single from I’m Only F***ing Myself.
This is the third LP in as many years from the 24-year-old pop-rocker who hit the mainstream last year when her anthem “Messy” went viral on TikTok. Kylie Jenner was among the 250,000 people lip-synching along to the snaggy hook: “Cause I’m too messy, and then I’m too f***ing clean.”
The sound of I’m Only F***ing Myself continues that song’s chaotic theme, bouncing between the basement grunge of “F*** Everyone” and “CAN WE IGNORE IT :(” and the cleaner-cut pop of “One Thing” or “D£aler”. There’s an autumn leaves-on-the-pavement vibe to the way Young mixes up the bright red and golds of synths with the darker, sludgier guitar sounds.
The south Londoner embraces a proper melting pot of genres, vocally hopscotching from a ragged Cerys Matthews-style howl on the shoegazey “SPIDERS” to the Raye-indebted glottal-stopped semi-rap of “One Thing”, then to the sweet, vulnerable crooning of “Post Sex Clarity”. Over the muzzy electric strum of the latter, she tells her lover: “I want you to trickle right down my throat.”
The warning word “explicit” appears in brackets next to eight out of I’m Only F***ing Myself’s 12 tracks. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Young explained that writing so openly about sex was her way of “masking” her emotions. “It’s kind of, this is my alter ego, the sex thing – but underneath it is pain and aggression and things I was going through that were more difficult,” she said.
So on the thrashy flip-off of “F*** Everyone”, her desire to “f*** guys/girls who don’t like me” feels like a cry for help, going one further than Raye’s “Escapism” with a third verse that goes: “I’ve been touching on your father, giving him head… right down in the gutter, blood on my knees ... and I don’t cry.” The hooks are grade A, but is it time for an intervention?
Perhaps not. Young faces down her monsters and demands we treat her as both the smartest, cutest and scariest creature in this hood. This album sees her take aim at the narcissistic ex of “Walk All Over You” who talks to her “like s*** on your shoes”. She brushes off the culturally constructed shame of only wanting “One Thing” from a lover (“men do it all the time”).
Some fans of Young’s poppier sounds might struggle with the more experimental clatter-crash of “CAN WE IGNORE IT :(” or the raw yowl of “SPIDERS”. But they’ll find safe harbour in the soulful cradles of “SAD SOB STORY :)”, on which she invites listeners to become friends by confiding details of an ex “so sick” that he “made me miss my best friend’s birthday”.
After all the mess of noise and sex and swearing, Young finishes with an acoustic number on which she describes taking prescription medication for the schizoaffective disorder she was diagnosed with as a teenager. This record’s greatest strengths (and weaknesses) lie in Young’s bold, blatant and occasionally bewildering commitment to being messy.
