LONDON and SANTA MONICA — It was a summertime Saturday in Paris, but Lola Young was about ready to go home. She had been on the road playing before audiences at several music festivals. But now, it was time for her to head home for some much needed rest.
Halfway around the world in Santa Monica, California – I found myself stuck on the 10 Freeway as I headed toward the beach. It was another one of those perfect days in California. Great weather and a relaxed vibe. These are just two of the things that makes people who don’t live here hate us.
I flipped on the radio, yeah, I still do that. Pretty soon the traffic started to flow and I was grooving to a new tune by a young artist named Lola Young. Her tunes are catchy and I was a fan from the moment I heard her music.
Back in Paris, the scene, by now, had become routine to the 24-year-old singer: a nondescript trailer behind layers of barricades, where, for months — from Indio, California, to Gdynia, Poland — Young had warmed up and waited before greeting growing music festival crowds that were increasingly singing along to her off-kilter pop songs.
The vibes at the previous day’s set in Switzerland had been slightly off. A night spent crossing the border in a 16-bed tour bus hadn’t helped. Young’s manager, Nick Shymansky, could sense her edginess, having become ever-attuned to the subtle fluctuations of her brain chemistry since they began working together seven years ago.
“She’s melancholy tonight and I can see it,” he whispered outside her trailer. “I don’t know if she knows it, but I feel it.”
Still, Young and her team knew she had to turn it on. A coveted evening slot at the French edition of Lollapalooza was another in a long string of “I made it!” moments that she had been chasing most of her life.
“It just depends on the day,” Young, still contemplative but slowly brightening, said the next morning on a train to London for a much-needed mini break. “Some days I wake up and I’m just pinching myself. There are other days I wish I wasn’t pinching myself.”
She continued haltingly, not wanting to sound ungrateful. “It’s hard getting a small — it’s not really a small taste, it’s quite a real taste — of some levels of fame, success and money, and all the glitz and glamour that you think you wanted,” Young added. “I’m [expletive] good at what I do, I worked really hard to be here, some people would die to be in my position, and some days I hate it. That doesn’t feel fair.”
Since breaking out with her too-much anthem “Messy,” a radio smash that grew from TikTok to No. 14 on the Billboard singles chart, Young is vying to become the latest in a growing lineage of young female singers for whom chronic disarray is both a selling point and a relatable, teachable moment, not their ultimate downfall.
As a songwriter whose chief muse is torment (self-imposed, biological, inflicted by rotten men), Young recalls the world-building rawness of recent forebears like Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan, who have studiously taken the previous generations’ sensations-slash-casualties — Alanis Morissette, Britney Spears, Sinead O’Connor, Amy Winehouse — as legacies worth building on and correcting.
But given Young’s history of substance abuse and mental illness (she was diagnosed as a teenager with schizoaffective disorder and ADHD), the balancing act is a daily, if not hourly, undertaking. “I smoke like a chimney / I’m not skinny and I pull a Britney / every other week,” she sings on “Messy.”
Since 2017, Young has worked closely with Shymansky, who managed Winehouse and gave her an ultimatum before her breakthrough album, “Back to Black”: Get clean or do it without me. Winehouse responded by writing “Rehab,” which went platinum, and winning six Grammys before she died of alcohol toxicity in 2011, at 27.
“The whole thing’s completely complex, but of course this is like a dream moment to me,” Shymansky, now 45, said of his second chance with Young. “I’m seeing this person that I deeply care about, that I feel is so special, and I’m getting to be the person I wish I could have been” for Winehouse, he said.
“It’s not going to be perfect,” Shymansky added, but “I believe she can have it all. I want her to have it in 2025 in a way that Amy could never have it.”
That means riding the rocket ship of fame as slowly and deliberately as possible, even as Young attempts to seize her moment with a new album, “I’m Only Fucking Myself,” out Sept. 19.
Written amid the yearlong rise of “Messy” and Young’s simultaneous attempts to get sober, the album catalogs her “crawling out of my own self-sabotage,” she said, which she has often cut, or “masked,” with eroticism and black humor.
“It’s funny, because you get to a moment where you go, ‘Oh, [expletive], like I’m kind of experiencing what I’ve been longing to experience for a while’ and it hits you in the face,” Young said before her Lollapalooza performance. “And then what?”
THE DAUGHTER OF a white British mother and a Chinese Jamaican father who is not part of her life, Young grew up fast in the Beckenham area of southeast London.
One of four sisters, she has the occasional brashness of a compensating street kid but can just as quickly retreat into a mopier, ruminative mode. “I can feel my frontal lobe developing,” Young said in her hallmark tumble of an accent, on a ride through some familiar locales the day after the Paris festival. “It kind of hurts sometimes. I feel the pain of knowing that I’m not quite there yet.”
Part Bratz doll and part Hello Kitty, she molts styles by the day or week, but generally favors large hoops, facial piercings, flashy tooth jewelry and a “full-beat” face, complete with exaggerated falsies and drawn-on freckles.
In conversation, Young refers frequently to past scraps, emotional and physical — being bullied by a girl four years her senior, slapping at a teacher who told her she shouldn’t rap — but increasingly sees that side of herself as a hard shell formed to protect her roiling, tender interior.
Violet May, a friend from that period, recalled their shared youth as dark and chaotic mayhem usually played off as high jinks. “We were both traumatized,” she said over shawarma, as Young enjoyed some homey normalcy at May’s Brixton apartment. “Because we were grown for our age, we were experiencing some stuff that was too, too much.”
Young agreed. That said, she added, it made for “bangin’ material.”
At 14, through an active, talent-seeking alumni network, Young enrolled at the prestigious Brit School, a performing arts incubator attended by musicians including Winehouse, Adele and King Krule.
“That was intense to me, because it was like, well, there’s people who are just allowed to be themselves,” she said of the culture shock. “I didn’t like that because I’d never been.”
Channeling her social anguish and intensifying mental health problems into devastating acoustic ballads, Young began to record and perform constantly, drawing notice as a busker and on the competitive local open-mic scene.
By 16, around when she was diagnosed with her mood disorder, Young had defeated some 9,000 entrants in the Open Mic UK contest with an original song, “Never Enough,” and the industry was starting to circle. At a South London showcase attended by every manager in town, Young met Shymansky, who had not worked directly with an artist since Winehouse’s death.
Shymansky had been scouting for a documentary he was developing with director Asif Kapadia (“Amy”). “It was mind-blowing,” he recalled, adding that she was “a sort of comedian, really sad songs and then really funny in between.”
Back in her dressing room after her set, Young was skeptical as Shymansky pitched his project. “And then I found out that he used to manage Amy Winehouse, and the tables turned,” she said.
After “she started introducing me to people as her manager,” Shymansky said, they brought on Nick Huggett, who had helped sign Adele to XL Recordings, forging a dream team that portended a best-case scenario for Young’s career: She could be Gen Z’s Amy Winehouse, without the tragic ending, or its Adele, with plenty more edge. (Huggett later left the management team.)
“You know, sometimes you meet someone and they’re just intrigued and you feel intrigued by them as a response to them being intrigued by you,” Young said of Shymansky. “I didn’t have a lot of older figures or mentors that I could trust.”
Over nearly a decade working together, her manager doubles as a protective big brother, cool uncle, guidance counselor and bemused fogy as needed. “There’s not five hours of my life I don’t get a [expletive] phone call” from the singer, Shymansky said. “And I’m happy to get a phone call. Even if she wasn’t an artist, she’d be one of the most interesting, brilliant people in my life. It’s a dream. And at times, not so much.”
BEFORE “MESSY,” Young’s career was a succession of almosts.
But the through line of her strongest work continued to be a plainspoken, sometimes brutal self-assessment: a stream-of-consciousness, run-on download from a wonderfully erratic brain.
These days, asked constantly about her knack for “honesty” in song, Young can only be incredulous: “I still don’t quite get it. What’s the other option?”
But those around her, Shymansky especially, can sometimes wince at the levels of realness. “If you’re hearing the music, it’s equally playful and fun, but also in isolation, incredibly worrying and dark,” he said. “The idea is just trying to get the balance.”
Going into “This Wasn’t Meant for You Anyway,” Young’s breakout breakup album from last year, she had an epiphany. “I decided to write as if I was speaking to somebody,” she said.
“A lot happened with my label, trying to find my brand, how I looked — and what happened in that process is that I started masking through a metaphor,” she said. Then it hit her: “People don’t really seem to be connecting to this.”
Young went through a similar process with her presentation on social media, which eventually helped catapult her to real fame. A few years ago, Shymansky brought on Lily West, a friend of his younger sister, to make honing Young’s visual persona fun, instead of a chore dictated by her label. They tried for years to “crack it,” West said, making amateur montages of couples in public, jumping on forced trends, filming bad dances.
Eventually, they happened upon a gimmick that worked, bringing attention to Young’s textured voice by putting her behind a huge professional microphone in unlikely locations (a swing, a canoe, a beach) and allowing her to sing live to a backing track.
Young’s music began to make its way to posts by influencers like Kylie Jenner, routinely reaching millions as TikTok’s aesthetic evolved alongside them. “But I’m not a TikTok artist,” Young insisted, mostly to herself. “I get insecure sometimes that I am, actually. I have to say it out loud.”
She and Shymansky agreed that the years it took them to bottle lightning made the eventual wins more fulfilling.
“It’s funny,” he said, “we’d have done anything at the time to have a hit, to have a moment, and you look at it now and you think, actually, I’m so sure it wouldn’t have worked out as well if it happened then.”
FOLLOWING UP A SMASH isn’t easy for anyone. For Young and Shymansky, the stakes are even higher.
In November, before recording her new LP at Electric Lady Studios in New York, Young entered a treatment center for five weeks to address her dependence on cocaine. By the New Year, she was back to the industry rat race, delivering a star turn on the “Tonight Show” couch with Jimmy Fallon and making a much-hyped appearance at Coachella in April, right as “Messy” was peaking.
At Lollapalooza in Paris, Young, Shymansky and West weighed options for teasing her new single, “Dealer,” on social media, after an initial taste had gone well; Elton John called it “the biggest smash I have heard in years.”
On the surface, Young seemed sturdy enough to face the onslaught of responsibility approaching with her album’s release. But when asked about her sobriety, Young could turn wary, taking a deep pull on her tobacco vape and whispering, nearly inaudibly, that things were simply “good.”
The album, she said, was the best document of her recovery journey. “It was dark and I’m very happy I’m growing out of it,” she said. “I want to be an advocate for people who’ve suffered, but I’m not quite in a position to go, ‘Sobriety is the way,’” she said. Not yet.
With some downtime between scheduled appearances this summer, Young had been hoping to take a few weeks to herself before the final promo push for “Myself.” But when Fallon’s team offered a last-minute slot to perform “Dealer” on “The Tonight Show” in late July, an impromptu New York trip was added to the calendar.
It never came to pass. A few days after her return to London, Young relapsed, Shymansky said, and returned to treatment.
“We’ve got to be really careful,” he said in an interview this month. “No one really knows the depths of what she is dealing with.”
“Her work ethic’s amazing and her commitment to herself is amazing,” Shymansky added, “but there’s inevitably going to be moments where she can’t keep up with both.”
With the album’s release date rapidly approaching, Shymansky had given her the option to clear the deck and focus on her health. Young, he said, chose to forge ahead.
As she returned to the stage a few weeks later, Young was joined behind the scenes by a sober coach, and remained surrounded by a team dedicated to protecting her, Shymansky said. Of the parallels in his own life with Winehouse, he said: “You can’t separate it. It’s uncanny.”
But he encouraged Young to not only put on a good face for fans. “If you’re struggling, share it,” he told her. “Explain it to people. Give them a chance to show that we’re in a different moment in time.”
Young is working on it. This month she moved into a new apartment — the first real spoils of her pop success — celebrating on social media with her old friend Violet, popping a bottle of sparkling tea in lieu of Champagne.
“I’m so excited to start a new chapter of my life,” she said, teary-eyed, in a video for her fans captioned “new beginnings.” It was one more step forward.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times and was originally written by Joe Coscarelli. Don Hughes added somethings here and there to localize it for the NetNewz audience. Photos courtesy of The New York Times: Featured image courtesy of Lucia Bell-Epstein of NYT taken on July 19, 2025. Lola with VioleTK. ‘Messy’ video courtesy of YouTube / Vimeo.
