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You’d struggle to find a room in the world big enough to hold everyone who connected to LØLØ’s debut album, but if you were to run a competition for the biggest fan in that mammoth room, there would be one clear winner – LØLØ herself.
After ‘falling for robots and wishing I was one’ was unleashed, the 28-year-old realised so many of her dreams. An album built around a conceptual world based on her favourite movie, serving as a sharp, emotionally armoured introduction, the Canadian musician found a way to dress up pain in a distinctly human way, topping it off with a whole lot of pop-rock bite.
For a while, it was euphoric. As the buzz of her first headline tour died down though, the realisation set in that trying to follow something like that is no small task.
“It was totally like, ‘Shit. What do I do now?’” she laughs.
“I loved my first album, my first headline tour and everything about that era so much. To me, it was perfect. I love it with my whole heart. After it was done though, I was like, ‘How will I ever top this?’”
That panic became the starting point for ‘god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!’, a second album that is in many ways the direct opposite of everything her debut represented.
Where ‘falling for robots and wishing I was one’ wrestled with the desire to shut off your emotions and become something inhuman, this one does the reverse. It leans into the spirals, the heartbreak, the intrusive thoughts, the ridiculousness of wanting someone who is clearly wrong for you, and the dark humour that often comes with trying to survive your own mess.
“When I was writing the first album, I put the songs into their own little world because I wasn’t sure how much of myself to bare. This time though, I was more okay with literally spitting out my feelings,” she shrugs.
“My debut was about wishing you were a robot and didn’t have to feel things, but whilst performing those songs I realised that an important part of being human is having all these feelings. That’s beautiful, and it’s special that we get to go through that together. I came into this album with a completely new mindset. I just word vomited everything that I’ve been feeling for the last year onto the page. It might not make sense as this beautiful, poetic story. But that’s okay.”
THE SOUND
LØLØ has shared stages with louder and heavier bands for long enough now to have heard every variation of the same tired complaint. Whether it’s ‘too pop’, ‘too soft’, or ‘too whiny’, those comments have followed her around since day one. On album two, though, she’s officially done with letting them dictate what she does.
“On tours and at festivals, I’m normally the poppiest or the most emotional on the line-up,” she says.
“I’ve gotten all of those comments around me being ‘too pop for the scene,’ and you know, maybe I am. Maybe I should just embrace that. I’m not as hardcore as some of the other bands in this genre, but I’ve never said that I am. That’s led me to explore more of my indie-pop side on this album, more in the direction of Alanis Morissette and Ashlee Simpson.”
In fact, LØLØ can point to one specific moment where the sound of the album truly clicked into place for her, shortly after writing ‘the punisher’ alongside Andrew Goldstein.
“We wrote it over an acoustic guitar, and Andrew said, ‘what if we just left it like this?’,” she remembers.
“I hadn’t done anything like that in a really long time, but he convinced me that the song was good enough to just stay like that. We didn’t need to make it any heavier. I also wrote ‘hung up on u’ and ‘me with no shirt on’ with Andrew, and I think you can tell that those three songs were made in the same room. It showed me that the stripped back side of me is cool too.”
Having grown up with two favourite albums – Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ and Hilary Duff’s ‘Metamorphosis’ – it’s impossible to deny that this is the most authentic version of LØLØ we’ve ever seen, leaning fearlessly into every facet of her sound.
There are still flashes of her bigger, glossier side in the strutting confidence of ‘007’ and the brutal emotional punch of ‘delusional darling’, but it’s in those intimate, instinctual moments where we see her truest artistic self. Trusting in the songs and learning to push the pressure of outside expectation aside, it’s an album that exudes all the energy and attitude we expect from LØLØ, but in a totally different way.
“I’ve always been scared to go poppier or cleaner because I worry whether I’ll still be considered part of the scene, but I realised that people are going to think what they think anyway,” she shrugs.
“I might as well just make the music that I like and call it a day.”
THE LYRICS
LØLØ is no stranger to writing lyrics that delve into the deepest, darkest parts of her mind, but this time there’s no neat conceptual frame to soften the blow. Making no attempt to tidy up the uglier parts of what she’s going through, the songs on ‘god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!’ feel like diary entries written in the middle of a breakdown, regurgitating words straight onto the page before your brain can translate that raw emotion into anything more digestible.
“It really is about embracing the messiness and the fact that this is what I’m going through,” she says.
“I’ve learned to stop thinking so much about what I’m writing, and just to treat songwriting like a therapy session.”
From the second that the album’s opening title track kicks in, it feels as though you are right there in the room watching LØLØ vent her feelings with no filter. One moment she is tearing herself apart for making the same mistakes again and again. Next, she is roasting herself for the desperation of her post-breakup internet stalking on ‘the punisher’. Importantly though, no matter how disastrous things get, she’s always having fun with it.
“I really am so unserious,” she laughs.
“I think it’s partly a defence mechanism. If I do get serious for a second, I realise how fucking sad it is, so I put humour around it. Of course it’s sad, but it’s also kind of funny when someone’s falling for the same type of guys or being delusional and constantly trying to make the same thing work. You have to be able to laugh at it, because what else are you gonna do? You can wallow in self-pity, or you can laugh. I guess I do both, but I prefer to laugh.”
Those brutally relatable self-owns are strewn all across the album. ‘me with no shirt on’ reflects on the humiliation of trying to save a doomed relationship and ‘american zombie’ pokes fun at her tendency to always go for the wrong guys. Elsewhere, ‘the devil wears converse’ acknowledges all the bad decisions we make despite knowing what the outcome will be and ‘lobotomy & u’ explores the temptation to go back to someone who hurt you because of the comforting nature of their presence.
It’s an album about wanting better for yourself but still being drawn back to the things that hurt you. Few songs capture that more bluntly than ‘the dumbest girl in the world’, a track inspired by LØLØ’s conversations with her closest friends.
“It’s basically saying, ‘Why are we all like this?’” she smiles.
“Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of people will be able to relate to that. We’re all trying, and I think the more experiences we have, and the more we learn, the easier it will get. Sometimes though, it just feels like I’m getting dumber and dumber. I’m newly single, and when I sing my older songs in rehearsals now it’s like, ‘Why do I still relate to this? When will I learn?’ It’s the same words, but I’m just relating it to someone else in my head now.”
That is the strange gift of LØLØ’s writing. She gets incredibly specific, often to the point of feeling almost uncomfortably personal, and yet every word lands because the emotions at the centre are so widely understood.
“No one’s ever had a unique experience in their life,” she smiles.
“Weirdly, the more specific I get, the more people seem to relate to it. Art is sometimes uncomfortable, but the important thing is that it’s making you feel something.”
“This album isn’t a story in the same way that my debut was, this is just the story of my life. At the start, I’m the dumbest girl in the world. By the last song, I realise that there are just some shitty people who don’t want to change. You can’t make someone change if they don’t want to.”
THE TITLE & ARTWORK
The title of LØLØ’s second album arrived in the middle of a spiral.
Staring at the tracklist until the words no longer looked real, for a while nothing was clicking. But after realising just how many of the songs revolved around love, heartbreak and the emotional rollercoaster of relationships though, an idea set in.
“I could already see the comments saying, ‘You only write about break ups’ and, ‘You just want to be Taylor Swift’,” she shrugs.
“It’s stuff that I’ve gotten in the past, and I was getting really anxious about it. I thought to myself, ‘god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!’. As soon as I had that thought, I knew that was my album title.”
Sarcastic but quietly furious, it’s an outburst that acknowledges the way women are often mocked for emotional honesty, especially when that honesty is geared around romantic relationships. That’s why every part of ‘god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!’ gets straight to the point.
From the title to the lyrics, LØLØ doesn’t try to present her emotions as something graceful and balanced here. Sometimes our feelings aren’t within our control, sometimes we blurt things out that we later regret, and often all we can do is laugh at ourselves and write a song about it.
That same idea bleeds into the album’s artwork, which loosely continues the storybook theme that began with ‘falling for robots and wishing I was one’. This time, instead of The Wizard Of Oz, we’re jumping into the pages of The Princess and the Pea, with a tiara-wearing LØLØ seated on a towering stack of mattresses holding a leopard-print notebook.
“This time, I wanted to get out of the land of Oz and explore the land of LØLØ,” she smiles.
“It’s still whimsical, but I wanted it to be like you had opened the pages of my diary and jumped in. For the artwork, I wanted to lean into the story of The Princess and the Pea. I’m on a bed because the album is centered around me writing these songs in my bed and the stripped back feeling of that. In the story though, the princess was on a bed with 20 mattresses. Even then, she could still feel the pea under her. I feel like that’s how sensitive I am, and I feel little things that normal people wouldn’t bat an eye at. I am very emotional, and so it’s a metaphor for being overly sensitive.”
THE COLLABORATORS
When LØLØ talks about songwriting sessions, she does so in a way that’s not dissimilar to how most people talk about therapy. Sitting in a room, unpacking things she hasn’t even told some of her closest friends, it’s an incredibly intimate process that requires the deepest level of trust.
Following the unwritten rule that nothing you say will leave that room, it helps when you can enter that environment with someone like DCF, a collaborator who has been in LØLØ’s orbit since the earliest days of this project. Someone who understands not just her sound, but the way she thinks, and her tendency to joke her way through discomfort, that sense of familiarity bleeds into the likes of ‘the punisher’, ‘hung up on u’ and ‘me with no shirt on’.
“I’ve been writing with him since my very first EP. He actually sang on ‘Stranger’s Arms’ in my ‘Sweater Collection’ era,” she recalls.
“He co-wrote three songs for this album with me, and he’s known me for a really long time. We’re super close, and he’s unfortunately seen me through quite a few breakups. With him, I can just get into a room and bare my soul. There’s no judgement there.”
Writing the album in between a hectic touring schedule though, LØLØ wasn’t able to lock into working with just one person this time around. Dotting between LA, Toronto, Nashville and more, she was forced to test out new collaborations this time around, including co-writes with Brian Dales of The Summer Set, Taylor Acorn, Spencer Jordan and more.
Beyond that, the album also pulls in the production talents of Andrew Goldstein, Mike Robinson – who LØLØ describes as “a musical soulmate” – Gus Van Go, Giordan Postorino and Danen Reed Rector. The first time she has built a body of work with this many producers involved, rather than making the album feel scattered, each offers a slightly different take on what a LØLØ song can be.
“Andrew and I actually had a couple of not-so-great sessions two years ago,” she explains.
“We didn’t come out of there with great songs, but then I started working with him on another project. That ended up going so well, so we decided to try writing for me one more time. It just worked, and me, him and DCF were such a good combo. I never want to lose that combo now.”
“There are five different producers on the album, but people keep telling me that they can’t tell because it sounds so cohesive, I like it though. It meant that I could really capture all the different flavours of LØLØ.”
THE FUTURE
LØLØ understands that making honest art in public means finding some kind of balance between letting people in and not letting them destroy your peace. If people are going to judge her for feeling too much though, she may as well give them something worth talking about.
She knows that there’ll be comments about her posted online once these songs are out in the world, and that not all of them will be positive. She knows that those parasocial relationships will always exist, and that people will assume to know her life story after hearing one song. Really though, there’s only one thing that truly matters to her.
If somebody out there hears these songs and feels a little less ridiculous, a little less lonely, or a little more seen because of it? That’s what this is all about.
“If it’s affecting even one person, I’ve done my job as an artist,” she finishes.
“All I really care about is people listening to my songs and being moved by them. If it can help even one person in the way that it’s helped me, that’s more than enough. Of course, I want to get billions of streams, and I want to be playing arenas… but not for selfish reasons like money or fame. I want those things because they mean I’ll be touching more people’s lives.”
“Growing up, I know how listening to a new album would make me feel. If I can do that for someone else… holy shit. Not to quote Spider-Man, but with great power comes great responsibility. Knowing that people are affected by my music feels heavy, but in a good way. It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that I’m the person that I so desperately needed when I was first discovering music.”
