When Lola Young stepped on stage at the London Palladium at the beginning of March, she didn’t quite know what to expect. “I was slightly nervous since I’ve been away,” she announces casually. You can file that under “understatements of the year”. The husky-voiced Gen Z pop sensation had been effectively MIA since she collapsed on stage at a New York festival in September of last year. All her gigs — including a 21-stop North American tour — were cancelled. “I really hope you’ll give me a second chance once I’ve had some time to work on myself and come back stronger,” she posted on Instagram. Then her socials went dark. What went through Young’s head as she walked on stage that night at the Palladium, right before she launched into her first song, a bruisingly tender deep cut called Bad Game (3AM) from her 2021 EP After Midnight at the Palladium? “Oh my gosh,” she replies, “I’m back.”
As we speak on video call a few days later, Young sits on the sofa in her white-walled flat, her chunky silver necklace and facial piercings winking in the light of an uncommonly sunny March afternoon. A baby grand piano peeks out from behind her.
This is not the first time we’ve spoken — back in autumn, before she collapsed, I caught up with her in person on the set of her Style shoot in a disused pub, before the launch of her new album, I’m Only F**king Myself. In a furry tracksuit and black New Rock boots, she was frank and funny company, slagging off the “f***ing gentrified Boxparks” that had replaced the Camden Market shop she’d purchased the boots from and puffing on a mint vape.
Vintage Gucci blouse and Hermès glove, Cassie Mercantile. Joggers, Lola’s own. Diamond rings, Lucy DeliusPhotographs: Ewen Spencer. STYLING: Michele Rafferty
Cardigan, Aries Arise. Diamond rings, from £6,700, Lucy Delius. Vienna Opera Ball tiara, Swarovski. All other jewellery, Lola’s ownPhotographs: Ewen Spencer. STYLING: Michele Rafferty
Today Young is more reticent and takes her time when it comes to how to answer the obvious question: what happened? “Um, so yeah, I think I would rather for the sake of my privacy not say too much,” she replies cautiously. “But what I would say is that recovery is an ongoing process. I’m not the finished article, but I’m doing a hell of a lot better.” By recovery, does she mean drugs? “I mean drugs recovery, yes. When you’re in recovery… that doesn’t necessarily need to mean drugs — but me specifically, yes.”
Before her self-imposed break, Young had everything that a young singer on the ascendant could wish for. Her anti-clean-girl ode Messy was racking up millions of listens and would become the UK’s most streamed track in 2025 by a British artist. With her Brit School pedigree, she was drawing inevitable comparisons to alumni like Amy Winehouse or other straight-talking London singers like Lily Allen, who is now a friend. “She said to me, ‘If anyone comes up to you wanting a photo, ask them what three songs they know of yours?’ I was like, I can’t do that, Lily!”
I’m Only F**king Myself was well received by critics — brash, filthy and frank in equal measure, alternating between swaggering bravado on horndog anthems like One Thing and raw melancholy on the grungy Spiders. Elton John told her that D£aler — an infectious pop vow to leave a drug dealer on “read” — was “the biggest smash I’ve heard in years”. But Young’s raw musical honesty, which makes her such an antidote to the bland, polished pop of some of her peers, also lays bare the source of her troubles. She sings openly about cocaine addiction, describing herself caustically as a “dumb little addict… trying to quit the snowflake” on tracks like Not Like That Anymore, and has been to rehab twice. In fact she recorded I’m Only F**king Myself at the end of 2024 after a five-week stay.
“There were a lot of things going on for me personally — I was going through a lot of mental health issues, a lot of battling with addiction,” she said of her time in the recording studio. Today, when I ask Young where she has been for the past few months — back to her mum’s in London? Staying with friends? — she says, “What I can tell you is that I was being looked after.” I later find out that she checked into a “holistic facility” that deals with addiction and mental health, and she is now attending AA.
When we met last year Young was noticeably tired, stifling yawns in between vape tokes. “I’ve been up since 6am,” she told me casually from the make-up chair on set. She had just flown back from LA after performing at her first VMAs, where she couldn’t quite muster the courage to speak to fellow attendees Lady Gaga and Mariah Carey — “Legends, you know?” Part of Young carefully inching her way back into the spotlight this spring involved performing in front of some of those very same celebrities at the Grammys, where she won the award for best pop solo performance for Messy. She received the gong from yet another homegrown queen of pop: Charli XCX. “Charli sent me a really sweet message during my break,” Young says, smiling at the memory. “She just said that she supports me and she’s there for me.”
The Grammys were the first time Young had been seen in public since her collapse. Even though her signature skunk-stripe mullet had been replaced by an all-brunette blowout, her acceptance speech was classic Lola: namely, she hadn’t prepared one, and she swore on stage while winging it. “That’s me!” she says now. “I’m weird, I’m a bit kooky. The way I received that award meant people maybe got to understand me a bit better — that I am just a f***ing weirdo.” A few weeks later she won the Brit for breakthrough artist and took care to prepare a speech, which she read off a lime green phone.
“I was shitting myself,” she says of her Grammy win. “I was in shock to be there, I was in shock to have won.” When she got off stage, she barely registered that one of her musical heroes, Carole King, had come up to congratulate her. “She held my hand and said, ‘It’s OK, sweetie, it’s Carole King.’” Did Young always plan to make her first public reappearance at the Grammys? “If I’m honest with you,” she says haltingly, “I think I didn’t know. You never know when the right time is, as an artist, when you’ve taken a break. It was a hard decision to make — I cancelled a whole tour that I was really excited to do.”
Vienna Opera Ball tiara, SwarovskiPhotographs: Ewen Spencer. STYLING: Michele Rafferty
Born in Croydon and brought up in Beckenham, southeast London, Young describes herself as a “naughty kid”. She was mainly raised by her mother, who is white and works for the mental health charity Mind; her father is Chinese-Jamaican. “It’ll always be a part of me,” she says. “I’m mixed race and it’s part of who I am.” Her stepdad is a session musician and she is one of four sisters — the youngest is 15 and the others work in musical theatre and for EarthPercent, Brian Eno’s climate foundation for musicians. The siblings grew up in each others’ pockets 24/7. “I remember this little fridge magnet that I got my sister,” Young recalls, “of two goldfish in a bowl saying, ‘It’s hard to miss you when you’re always around.’”
Young played the piano as a child and taught herself guitar, listening to folky singer-songwriters such as Paolo Nutini and Joni Mitchell alongside old-school hip-hop by Biggie Smalls and Tupac. She fell in and out of house parties, busking and performing her own songs at open-mic nights (the album is bookended by a voice note and a poem from friends she made at that time). In year 9 she successfully auditioned for the Brit School, though she’s at pains to stress that it isn’t the all-singing, all-dancing Fame academy of yore. “You still did all your lessons. I mean, I didn’t listen to anything because I’m terrible — I was so ADHD, it went through one ear and out the other.” She toyed with the idea of going into songwriting for other artists but ultimately vetoed it: “These songs feel so personal that it made sense me singing them.”
Young performing at an open-mic night in Croydon, where she went to school, 2016shutterstock
At the Vanity Fair Oscar party this monthChristopher Polk/Variety/Getty Images
A year before she graduated she met Nick Shymansky, Amy Winehouse’s former manager, at an industry showcase. The 45-year-old hadn’t managed an artist since the pair parted ways over Winehouse’s substance issues in 2006. Watching Young was enough to pull Shymansky out of retirement. “Huge character, massive voice, incredible lyricist,” he told me last year of her appeal. “I’m very picky about what I do. Everyone was kind of shit after Amy. I felt the opposite with Lola —[here’s] someone who’s good, even better.” Young was signed to Island in 2019.
Over the next few years Young refined her initial approach to music and started dressing for herself — mullet, baggy tracksuits, drawn-on freckles — and singing in her natural south London accent. Then she met the SZA producer Jared Solomon (aka Solomonophonic) and recorded Conceited, a spiky, King Krule-esque barnstormer about a toxic relationship that set the tone for much of her current output. “I was growing up,” she said. “I was like, you know, no longer 18 and freshly signed and didn’t know who I was. I was a little bit more headstrong. I knew what I wanted to say.” It’s a broad sentiment that Young returned to repeatedly over the course of our first conversation, sitting opposite me in the backroom of the pub.
The downside of an artist going viral on TikTok — even after years of unseen hard work — is that people assume you were randomly blessed with algorithmic fame and look for every opportunity to stick the knife in. Take, for instance, the accusation that Young has had a leg up thanks to her being related to the children’s author Julia Donaldson. When I jokingly asked in our first conversation if she felt haunted by The Gruffalo, she sighed: “Look, it’s my aunt — no, not necessarily haunted.” She has since stopped reading comments on her posts. “It’s just too bad on my mental health.” When did she make that decision? “Particularly around the nepo baby stuff. I keep saying I’m not gonna comment on this again. But like, how dare someone comment on something they know f*** all about? It just is insane to me.”
The pressure of being a music star in 2026 is tougher than ever. “Some artists are like athletes in that they can do it all,” Shymansky told me. “Lola doesn’t claim to be that — she needs her space, she needs to live and create. Sometimes things are overwhelming, and we need to really look out for that and protect that.” Indeed, Young is quick to confirm how supportive her manager is. “I classify Nick Shymansky as my family member,” she says firmly. Instead her collapse on stage last year seems to have been the wake-up call that Young and her team needed to re-evaluate exactly how she was riding the white-knuckle rollercoaster of fame. When we first met Young pulled a 15-hour day, running from the Style set to a Channel 4 News interview to an evening album playback party — I very much doubt she agrees to gruelling days like that now. On our video call Young grows increasingly impassioned on the subject: “As artists we are public-facing figures. We get scrutiny, we get people calling us out, we get people not liking our bloody outfits — we have to deal with all of it. And even though from the outside it may look like we are doing fine, sometimes we’re not.”
Baby T-shirt, £50, and socks, £20, Aries Arise x Lola. Net skirt, Carolina Herrera Photographs: Ewen Spencer. STYLING: Michele Rafferty
Baby T-shirt, £50, Aries Arise x Lola. Dress, Ashish. Millenia bangle, £199, and Millenia ring, £139, SwarovskiPhotographs: Ewen Spencer. STYLING: Michele Rafferty
It’s hard to square the slightly reserved figure with the confident showwoman I saw at the London Palladium, where she performed a run of tracks from I’m Only F**king Myself before ending on Messy, which she described on stage as “the song that changed my life”. Before Young started performing the atmosphere inside the 116-year-old theatre crackled with the nervousness of a big football game when nobody knows how their side will perform. But by the time she slid into D£aler, the upstairs balcony was groaning under the weight of 500 fans jumping to their feet. The emotional release was palpably joyful, the tracks even more stirring live, and, for an album that has yet to be toured, all the more impressive that a significant part of the audience knew almost all the words. When I turned around to look at the audience — a motley crew of fans across all generations and genders, including several Lola lookalikes with two-tone hair — more than one was mouthing along to all the words, tears of mascara running down their faces.
It probably hasn’t unfurled in exactly the way Young wanted, but her absence seems to have allowed her album’s songs to breathe and to take root in fans’ hearts outside of the gruelling 24/7 promo cycle. (Not that she’s resting on those laurels — she is already in the studio with the producers James Blake and Mustard, of Kendrick Lamar Not Like Us fame.) After we speak for the final time, she announces six dates in the UK in June, including two at the O2 Academy Brixton in London. Her schedule is pared back by design, she says. Part of being in recovery is “being self-aware and knowing when to stop, and knowing when to say no”.
“I am now in a position where I can do things I couldn’t have done before,” Young adds, growing reflective. “Doing it slower, more intentionally, but doing it in a way I feel is good for me.” Does she have anything to say to others who are also in recovery? She pauses for a long time and apologises. “I need to think about this before I speak,” she explains, then gathers her thoughts and says emphatically: “I would like to say that this is an ongoing journey. You have to be kind to yourself. You have to always remember that you are not alone. You are not ever, ever alone.”
I think back to an early moment during her Palladium gig, the crowd screaming in appreciation as she finished belting out Spiders on piano. Young shot her audience a look of shy disbelief, as if she couldn’t quite fathom why they had even turned up at all. I hope she understands a bit better now.
Lola Young’ s album I’m Only F**king Myself is out now. Her UK tour starts on June 10. lola-young.com
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