By India Block

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Lola Young, 24, is an artist teetering on the knife edge of greatness. The Nick Shymansky-managed BRIT-school alumni hit the mainstream last year, going all the way to the top of the charts with her ADHD chaos anthem Messy.

This year she had performed at the BRITS, where she took home the Rising Star award, plus Coachella and Glastonbury while preparing to drop her third album I’m Only F**cking Myself. Those are official asterisks (and style guide compliant journalists thank her for it) but the material within is anything but self-censored.

Young has been in and out of rehab to address a cocaine habit, starting with a five-week stay in November 2024 followed by recording this very album. “I’m a dumb little addict so I’ve been trying to quit the snowflake,” she confesses on Not Like That Anymore. “I guess life sucks dick but especially if you try to sniff it all away.” On another track, d£aler, she fantasizes about leaving it all behind with fleeing-down-the-highway rock flair while pining for her supplier. She had to pull out of performing it on The Tonight Show in July due to a relapse.

The whole album is incredibly frank, mining toxic relationships and refusing to apologise for being a woman who enjoys sex. Young’s lyrics make Sabrina Carpenter’s offering on Man’s Best Friend seem positively PG. Opening track (bar a curious voice note interlude) F**K EVERYONE is a paean to screwing your life up while screwing around. “She bent me over in the garden/ Mud on my knees,” she sings with pop punk nonchalance. Young recently came out as bisexual in a TikTok clapback — “I like p***y as well u kno” — but fellow bisexuals with that two-tone messy shag-mullet already knew. And of course the single, One Thing, spent five weeks in the Top 20 with its immortal line “I wanna make you feel appreciated when you’re deep up in me.”

With her soul-pop-punk sound, smokey tone and south London accent (she was born in Beckenham) Young’s vocals are instantly recognisable, but she also has a clear and witty writing voice.

It’s on full display on SPIDER, the album’s sleeper hit that’s nominally about being unable to sleep with an arachnid in a bedroom and begging your partner to deal with it, but it’s really about suffocating under toxic gender roles. “I’m not a woman if I don’t have you/ And you’re not a man if you don’t have me,” Young sings over a fuzzily distorted bass before screaming “Suck me dry like you did before.” On the deliciously dirty ballad Post Sex Clarity, Young insists “‘When I finish it’s not the end of you and I”.

I’m Only F**cking Myself deserves to be a hit album, but its self-destructive bent coming from a young and clearly vulnerable artist is concerning. Young was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder at 17. A typical age for the condition to manifest but potentially triggered, she told the Telegraph in 2022, by self-medicating with cannabis to deal with childhood trauma. Young has embraced the creative highs it gives her as a “superpower”, but it can also see her hospitalised. She was recently diagnosed with ADHD, which inspired Messy. Then there’s rehab stints before her pre-frontal cortex is even developed.

Young is the first artist Nick Shymansky has managed since he parted ways with Amy Winehouse, right before she made the big time with Back to Black. Rehab was Winehouse’s wry diss track aimed at her former manager for attempting to get her help; she died of alcohol poisoning at 27 the day before Shymansky’s wedding.

This time, Shymansky seems determined to protect his talent, getting her to rehab and employing a sober coach for tours. He’s also been clear that Young can pull out of any appearance to seek medical attention. She’s often a trooper, powering through heat-induced sickness at Coachella and an earpiece malfunction at Capital’s Summertime Ball. There was some fan backlash when she pulled out of Reading and Leeds, citing scheduling issues, then was spotted on Instagram at Notting Hill Carnival. Give the young woman a break; three albums in three years and several major mental health issues to juggle can’t be easy.

Knife edge’s are sharp and steep either side. Artists often cut into their own torment to produce great art. But a talent such as Young’s also deserves peace and careful preservation. Let’s hope that support system stays strong and she can keep making albums this good.

I’m Only F*cking Myself by Lola Young is out via Island Records on 19 September