Having made a name in unflinching honesty and writing without fear, LØLØ’s new album sees the Canadian singer embracing her vulnerabilities more than ever before. On a weekday morning in LA, we meet the pop-rock superstar in the midst of a break-up, and more than ready to open up her diary and dive into what it means to feel so deeply…
It’s 7:30am in Los Angeles, and LØLØ has not long woken up. She also just broke up with her boyfriend.
Such an emotional upheaval coming so close to the landmark moment of releasing her second album (the excellently-titled god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!) is kind of on-brand for the pop-rock star, whose music wrestles with what it means to navigate love and life as a woman who feels everything so deeply, and at 100 miles per hour.
“It’s fine. I was in my lover era for this album, and now I’m just like, ‘We go again!’” she jokes, coffee in hand, glasses on and a cosy sweater cushioning the blow of an early rise and an interview with a lot to unpack. “Now I really feel like I have so many more ideas!”
While LØLØ (or Lauren Mandel to her ex) begins to formulate ideas for an expanded deluxe edition, we must first dive into the incoming record, which is genuinely brilliant, and full of her trademark witty lyrics that read like they’re ripped straight from the pages of her journals. Because, well, they are.
Her writing is a unique, sarcastic blend of Carrie Bradshaw meets Sylvia Plath meets Avril Lavigne. She has her diary right beside her as we talk – “ready for therapy after this” – but when she reads her old entries, she doesn’t tend to see them as poetic masterpieces waiting to be put to music.
“Capital C, Cringe,” she laughs of the ick they give her. “I feel like I’m a little jaded now. I’m like, ‘Oh, poor girl. She thought she had issues then – just wait!’”
LØLØ is a mouthpiece for young women everywhere. The way she puts pen to paper to try to understand her emotions is relatable for so many, but especially girls who’ve found that social conditioning has forced them into swallowing their feelings and not making a fuss.
And these big whopping feelings have been a linchpin in all of Lauren’s music, reaching right back to her early EPs and her 2024 debut, falling for robots & wishing i was one. But while the LP record saw her rejecting human emotions, here she is reclaiming her softness and vulnerabilities. Like picking at a scab or looking directly at the sun, LØLØ is embracing how good it hurts when pain and euphoria are intertwined.
“I realised while touring my first album that I don’t want to be a robot anymore,” she admits. “When I was writing it I was like, ‘Why am I so emotional? I feel like I’m so overly sensitive and it gets me into trouble.’
“At the end of the shows I would say, ‘I love being human, what a gift it is to feel things; that is what makes us human and not metal. We get to do that all together and share this human experience.’ In saying that and learning that about myself, I felt like, yeah, why not spit [your feelings] out and be loud and overly sensitive?”
Having grown up as a theatre kid and a lover of books, LØLØ has always enjoyed telling a story through music. Her debut took inspiration from The Wizard Of Oz and Wicked, and similarly, this new record also hints at a classic children’s tale on its cover, which sees the singer sitting on a stack of mattresses, laptop in hand and a tiara perched on top of her long brown hair.
So, what’s the deal? Either LØLØ placed a few too many orders of boxed memory foam beds online, or she’s the modern-day Princess And The Pea, the classic fairytale written by Hans Christian Andersen and published back in 1835.
“I wanted to do The Princess And The Pea, because the princess can feel the tiniest pea under 20 mattresses because she’s so sensitive. That fits perfectly with me. The tiniest thing will make me feel so heavily, that wouldn’t necessarily make a normal person feel like that,” LØLØ explains. “My dad used to tell me, ‘Never cry in front of people, don’t show weakness.’ Honestly, I love crying! I don’t like what makes me cry, but sometimes you just need a good cry and you feel better after. I also think girls are always made to feel like we’re too emotional or we’re crazy. But no, I just have boundaries.”
“Girls are always made to feel like we’re too emotional or we’re crazy. No, I just have boundaries”
Through writing about her tender spirit and exploring it so deeply, LØLØ has had quite a few epiphanies about how it bleeds into her experiences with love and relationships. And that romcoms are the main culprit for her rose-tinted views on dating, winding up with a fixer-upper time and again.
“I see the world like everyone has goodness in their heart,” she says. “I see the best in people and I want to fix them. A guy will tell me [he’s] fucked up and I’ll think, ‘No, he deserves me. I can fix him.’ I want him to win, I’m fucking rooting for him! I root for the underdog.
“I was just rewatching He’s Just Not That Into You. The movie starts with a girl in the playground and this boy comes up to her and kind of pushes her and calls her ugly or something. The mom says to her, ‘Oh honey, don’t worry. Do you know why he did that? It’s because he likes you,’” she pauses to roll her eyes. “How many times have we heard that? I honestly think that fucked us up as girls… I hope that girls these days are not brought up that way. When I have a child in the future, I will definitely tell her when a boy picks on her that he’s an asshole!”
Still, she can’t seem to break the habit of longing for the bad guy.
“My mom has been telling me, ‘You need to date a nerd. You are a nerd at your core, and you need to date another nerd.’ But I want to date a drummer! I don’t go for the nice guy. I never have. I go for the dark, brooding, mysterious cool guy. I blame TV and movies. Like The Vampire Diaries. Why did we all want her to end up with Damon and not Stefan?”
While on the topic of vampires, we feel now is a good time to ask the crucial question: team Edward or team Jacob?
“Oh my god! What do you think? Obviously Edward! [Bella] and Edward just had this thing. It’s so passionate, so intense. I almost ended up writing a song [about them], I had a title in my notes called ‘Edward was bad for Bella’ and it was going to be a story about [how he was bad for her], how Romeo was bad for Juliet, all these people…”
These cycles run deep and aren’t easy to break. We’ve likely all found ourselves in a doomed relationship at some point, or are even in one right now, but while most feel too embarrassed to admit it, LØLØ writes about these toxic attractions with no shame. On dumbest girl in the world she sings, ‘Here comes the poster child of stupidity / Look how she digs her own grave and dives in so exquisitely,’ while on delusional darling, where she justifies her tunnel vision and jests of cutting out her own eyes to avoid all bad signs, she admits, ‘Honestly I’m scared of being on my own.’
“I just remember that scene in 8 Mile when Eminem makes fun of himself so the other guy has nothing to say in the rap battle,” LØLØ explains. “[People] have nothing bad to say if I’m self-aware. I definitely use humour that way, it’s kind of a self-defence thing, but I also think it’s important to laugh at yourself. I’m the most unserious person I know.”
Perhaps one of the most honest and uncomfortable songs from the new album is recent single me with no shirt on, in which she unpicks the awkwardness and brutality of sending an unreciprocated pic in her undies, but more broadly explores how it feels when you realise someone doesn’t feel the same way about you anymore when they once were just as infatuated.
A new favourite amongst fans for its bare-faced honesty, its awkward nature made LØLØ wince when she thought of how people in her life were going to hear it.
“People loved it, and I realised my boyfriend’s parents have me on Instagram – my ex-boyfriend’s parents – all these people from high school I haven’t spoken to. It’s funny now that I’m single again; I used to be so fine with sharing all this stuff that sometimes feels cringe or uncomfortable, because whatever, my boyfriend already loves me. Now I’m like, ‘Oh my god, these new potential boyfriends, these strangers are gonna come to my Instagram page and [see], ‘I sent you a picture of me with no shirt on,’” she sings between laughter.
“But we’ll see how that goes. My husband’s out there waiting for a picture of me with no shirt on…”
LØLØ feels as if this album sees her only getting more and more vulnerable. She admits that that these days her offstage life as Lauren and her onstage life have now pretty much morphed into one, where previously she treated the two as separate entities. Or, as she describes it, “pure Hannah Montana vibes”, swapping out the blonde wig for spiky wrist cuffs.
She tells us so much about who she is through her art, and yet there are still parts of LØLØ and Lauren that are largely misunderstood.
“I probably come across crazier than I am in real life – I’m a lot more chill,” she confesses. “I put on a certain perception of being really crazy and energetic all the time, and a lot of the time I’m actually really introverted, like being alone in my room with the door shut.”
Allowing her stories even more space to breathe, this new era has afforded LØLØ the opportunity to strip things back sonically. Previously encouraged to go in a heavier direction by producers, this time she’s kept just two core ingredients in every song.
“My favourite music is a girl or a guy and their guitar,” she says. “I’m enjoying exploring this Michelle Branch, Alanis Morissette, Ashlee Simpson side of pop-rock, rather than the Green Day, Weezer side.
“For my whole career, all the songs start pretty much on a guitar in my bedroom. For this album we’ve really kept that stripped-back-ness for me with no shirt on, hung up on u and the punisher. It was the first time I worked with producer Andrew Goldstein, and it was the first time that a producer wasn’t like, ‘Let’s add these big guitars and big drums.’”
“I probably come across crazier than I am in real life – I’m a lot more chill”
When LØLØ spoke to Kerrang! for her 2024 cover, she shared how she’s often the most pop-sounding act on every rock festival bill. Some artists may have wavered under the pressure to fit into these spaces and go heavier, but by pushing even further away, LØLØ feels like she opened up a new side to her writing.
Much like her diaristic penmanship, leaning into poppier, softer sounds is often not taken as seriously, because they’re so often associated with femininity. Women’s art is made to feel frivolous or wishy-washy, particularly when diving into love or emotion. But why is anger often seen as strong and expressive in the music of men, but annoying or weak in that of women?
Tapping into her rage makes LØLØ right at home in the world of rock. She floats like a butterfly but stings like a bee, and won’t be sorry if you come out the other side a little sore.
“You wanna be an asshole?” she says. “You’re going to get a song. That’s kind of the inspiration behind the title-track. There’s an amazing line in it that I love: ‘You messed up now everybody’s singing.’ I’ve written love songs too, and there are love songs on the album. It’s just more fun writing when I’m angry. When I’m happy I don’t feel like I need to have an outlet.”
LØLØ has long since had the ability to reach into other people’s lives with her honesty. She’s had people come up to her at the end of shows and say that her music helped them realise they were in an abusive relationship, or that she inspired them to start playing guitar. These are life-altering things, born off the back of her work.
She wants you to not let the fear of what others think take hold in your life, too. Embrace the discomfort of speaking your truth, but don’t sit in it.
“I saw this really good thing from [personal growth guru] Mel Robbins. She said count down from five, and then just fucking do it. Just jump over that hurdle. Once you start, every step of the way becomes easier. Don’t think about what other people are going to think, because people are always going to think no matter what, even people that love you. So what? They’re going to think about you for one second, and then they’re going to go right back to thinking about themselves, because we’re all innately selfish creatures.”
Echoing this sentiment are LØLØ’s live shows. They’re a space of acceptance where you can, very aptly, spit out your ugliest feelings without judgement or self-censoring. You can even do so in your best princess attire. If that’s not your thing, well, you know what to do…
“I will die if someone dresses as the pea,” she laughs.
With a tour across the UK and Europe coming after the release of the record, it doesn’t mark the ending to this peculiar fairytale LØLØ finds herself in. At the end of The Princess And The Pea, the princess gets married, and the pea is put on display in a museum. But who needs a prince anyway? Sometimes they’re more of an ache in your side than a goddamn lumpy pea. The community forged by LØLØ’s self-deprecation and unfiltered relatability is an infinite source of happily ever afters.
“It makes me so happy,” she nods proudly. “I do all of this stuff to let out my feelings – this is my therapy. To hear that my therapy is other people’s therapy, that is the coolest thing in the world.”
god forbid a girl spits out her feelings is out April 17 via Fearless Records
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