It’s a sweltering afternoon in London, where this conversation is being had from, when the call connects to Toronto. LØLØ is on the other end, enjoying what sounds like a rare stretch of decent weather, talking about yoga and walks and a chill work-from-home day. Meanwhile, the London end of the Zoom is melting. “Yeah, but we’re not built for this,” comes the confession about the heat, and LØLØ laughs in sympathy from across the Atlantic. Within minutes, she’s talking about feelings she “quite literally spits out,” about diary entries that became songs, about the moment she stopped being embarrassed by how hard she feels things.
That unfiltered quality is exactly what defines god forbid a girl spits out her feelings, her second full-length LP and debut for Fearless Records, an album that functions less like a tracklist and more like a crime scene. It is also, depending on your threshold for emotional honesty, either the most relatable record you’ll hear this year or the most uncomfortable. Probably both.
“My debut album had me wishing I could be a robot, so I didn’t have to feel anything and nobody could hurt me,” she said of the record. “This next one is what happens when I start embracing every messy, scary, and inconvenient feeling of being human. After all, feeling everything is kind of the whole point, right?”
Where her 2024 debut falling for robots & wishing i was one generated tens of millions of streams and earned LØLØ glowing notices from Kerrang! — who wrote that “we need artists like LØLØ to bear their hearts to help fill ours” — and Atwood Magazine, who praised its “unapologetic ferocity,” this follow-up finds her stripping things back further, sonically and emotionally. Guitar-forward, direct, occasionally brutal. American Songwriter had already christened her “a pop-rock girly with an edgy vulnerability,” and this album leans into that description without apology. She describes the songs as “diaristic, ripped straight from the pages of my journal, chronicling every intrusive or delusional thought, every downward spiral that goes on in the labyrinth I call my mind.” There is no distance between LØLØ the person and LØLØ the songwriter. They are the same person, and she stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around the time she started touring her debut.
The shift didn’t happen overnight. It started on the road. “I was singing the lyrics and would look out into the audience and see people singing the words back and being really affected by it, screaming or laughing or crying,” she says. “I’d meet people at meet-and-greets and they’d be like, ‘Oh my God, every line, word for word, this is me.’ And I kind of realised, we all feel the exact same things.”
That realisation gave her permission to stop managing herself on the page. “Back when I was writing my first album, I was kind of ashamed of feeling things so heavily,” she says. “There was an underlying shame slash embarrassment. I was like, ‘Why do I have to be like this?’ Whereas for this album, I’m kind of just like, well, I’m like this.” The shift wasn’t a switch, she’s at pains to point out. More of a steady slope. “Slowly and slowly, and then I woke up one day and I was like, ‘Oh, I bare it all now.'”
The result is an album that doesn’t blink. She’ll write about jealousy, insecurity, intrusive thoughts, rejection, with so much direct reporting. The sense of specificity that makes a listener feel both seen and slightly implicated. She describes the writing process as word-vomiting onto the page and then, crucially, not editing it. “I don’t really think about what I’m writing. I kind of just word-vomited it out, and then this time I just didn’t edit it at all.” The songs are hers before they’re released, she says. After that, they belong to everyone else. “That’s when I think, ‘Oh damn, this person’s going to hear it” She shrugs it off. “But it’s already too late and it’s out, so it is what it is.”
The title itself is equal parts wry observation and challenge. Women, she points out, are still punished for emotions that aren’t packaged neatly. “Someone shows emotion and people are like, ‘You’re crazy,’ or ‘She’s overdramatic,’ or ‘She’s too sensitive.'” She wants the album to push back on that — and not only for women. “I feel like there’s such a taboo around men showing emotion and stuff. So I feel like it could go for anyone.” She’s not preaching, though. The politics of the album are embedded in the personal, not announced from above. If anything, its critique lands harder for being delivered through specifics: a hung-up phone call, a social media creep, a shirt that wasn’t worn.
The album’s guiding metaphor comes from an unlikely source. She takes the fairy tale The Princess and the Pea as a touchstone, the idea of a sensitivity so fine-tuned it becomes its own kind of power. “I’m extremely sensitive, emotionally intuitive, feeling everything that other people might ignore,” she says. “The world, and the people I write about, might call it ‘too much.’ But this album flips that on its head.” It is, ultimately, an album about owning that sensitivity rather than apologising for it.
Her instinct for finding the universal in the hyper-specific isn’t new. Her biggest song to date, You Turn Me On But You Give Me Depression, nearly didn’t get made. She walked into a Nashville writing session, pitched the title cold, and was met with genuine hesitation. “The other writer was like, ‘I think that’s a little bit too specific. I don’t know if anyone actually feels that way.'” She held her ground. “I was like, ‘Trust me, everybody must. If I feel it this deeply, someone else gets this.'” The producer and writer pushed back. She pushed harder. “I ended up winning, obviously, and now it’s my best song.” She still brings it up. “I always laugh at them and say, ‘Remember when we almost didn’t write this song because you guys thought it was too niche?'”
It’s a story that doubles as a thesis statement. The further LØLØ leans into her own particular brand and identity, the more people show up for it. Since 2018, she’s built a devout following on exactly this principle, holding nothing back and trusting that the people who need to find it will. A series of fan-favourite EPs led to the debut album, which led to the road: tours alongside jxdn, Boys Like Girls, Simple Plan, and Against The Current, plus sold-out headline shows. The audience has been growing. So has her willingness to be exposed in front of it.
The people she writes about, incidentally, tend to know. “It’s too specific to not know, unfortunately,” she says, without any apparent guilt. “And then also people that I don’t write about, multiple people will think it’s about them.” She once had someone’s sibling reach out claiming a song was about their brother. It wasn’t. She didn’t correct them. “I’m like, ‘It’s not, but I’m not going to burst your bubble.'”
Songwriting, she is clear, is therapy first. During a vocal injury that sidelined her at the end of last year and into early 2025, she had to see an actual therapist for the first time in her life. When she explained that she’d never needed one before, that writing songs had always been the outlet, her therapist’s reaction stuck with her. “She was like, ‘I can’t believe you’ve never done therapy before.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I used to always just write songs, but now I can’t because I’m not allowed to sing.’ She said, ‘I want you to know that’s just as good as what we do here.'” She laughs. “And I was like, ‘Oh, good to know that it actually is just as good.'”
LØLØ is funny in a way that serves a function, she’ll make the joke before anyone else can, and she learnt the instinct young. “I always try to laugh at myself so that no one can laugh at me first,” she says. “I feel like I learnt that from the Eminem movie, 8 Mile. I watched that as a kid and I was like, ‘Oh, okay. You’ve got to make fun of yourself so no one else can make fun of you.'” It’s not deflection exactly. More like armour that happens to be entertaining.
Sonically, the album reflects a deliberate repositioning. She’d been told before that she was too pop, not pop punk enough, not pop rock enough. She decided to lean into it rather than argue. “Pop rock is such a broad genre,” she says. “There’s Weezer, Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins pop rock, and then there’s Michelle Branch and Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair.” Growing up, she loved Avril Lavigne and also thought Hilary Duff was a rock star. The album sits somewhere in that lineage, melodically sharp, emotionally unguarded, guitar where it earns its place. “I always call myself pop with rock elements,” she says. “I wouldn’t call myself punk, but I think sometimes my lyrics and what I say could be considered punk. Going against the grain.”
Her self-awareness extends to the way she navigates being chronically online, which for working artists in 2025 is less a choice than a condition of employment. The exposure cuts both ways. “When you’re chronically online and putting yourself out there so much, people feel like they can comment on every little thing about you,” she says. “Sometimes it gets a little too intense. I have to step back and shut my computer and be like, ‘Whoa. I’m a real person. I have real feelings.’ As much as someone can think they know me, no one really knows except me.” She calls it a catch-22, a double-edged sword, a curse, something she’s grateful for, sometimes all in the same breath. The internet is how fans find her, how she stays connected to the people who make this whole thing viable. It’s also, she’s under no illusions, something of a nightmare.
But the relationship between LØLØ and her audience is clearly something she takes seriously, in a way that goes beyond metrics. That moment on tour, watching strangers mouth her words back at her, wasn’t just validating. It changed how she understood what she was doing. “I don’t really want to be a robot,” she says. “I’m happy to be a human and share these lived experiences with the rest of these humans.”
After a headline run through Europe and the UK, she’s heading back to Nashville to finish a deluxe edition, then back on the road for the rest of the year, North America, Asia, and one more destination she won’t announce yet. For someone who spent her first album wishing she could switch her feelings off, she seems remarkably comfortable with having them now.
“Don’t ever be scared to spit out your feelings,” she says, signing off like someone who has long since stopped being scared herself.
“god forbid a girl spits out her feelings” is out now on Fearless Records.
