Into The Music
Lola Young did not ease her way back. After a health scare in late 2025 that forced her off stage in September, she returned to performing and stepped onto the Grammy stage in February to perform “Messy” to an audience that already knew every word. The nomination for Best New Artist, the UK chart history, the Grammy moment itself, it all happened while she was also dealing with something serious enough that she had to stop. The math of it is almost absurd. Most artists get to build their comeback with a runway. Young got a lighting bolt.
She is from Herne Hill in south London, trained at the BRIT School, released her first album in 2022, and then discovered that the song she’d been sitting on for months, “Messy,” was going to change what the next few years looked like. It became the most-downloaded track in the UK in 2025. It was a song about emotional chaos delivered with the kind of controlled intensity that only makes sense if you understand exactly what you’re saying. She understood.
The follow-up album, “I’m Only Fucking Myself,” released in September 2025, was produced with Manuka and SOLOMONOPHONIC and did not try to repeat “Messy” so much as extend whatever it was pointing at. The self-sabotage angle, the addiction-as-escape framework, the willingness to be completely unflattering about her own interior life, all of that is present and it is not softened for palatability. Young writes like someone who has decided the only point of writing is honesty, and everything else can follow or not.
The Elton John AIDS Foundation Oscars Party in March brought another high-profile performance. The 2026 touring schedule is extensive, with UK headline shows, North American dates, and festival appearances including Reading and Leeds. The machine is fully running now. What is interesting is that it feels like the machine is running because the music is strong, not the other way around.
Young is twenty-three. The maturity in her writing does not feel performed. It feels like someone who had to grow up fast and chose to make the growing-up visible rather than hidden. There is a difference between artists who write about difficulty and artists who actually bring you into it. She is the second kind, and that is the harder and more valuable thing to be.
The question now is what she does with the size of the platform she has. So far the answer has been: the same thing as before, just louder. That is, probably, the right answer.