LØLØ Knows Exactly How Ridiculous She’s Being. It Hasn’t Stopped Her Yet.
There’s a moment in “me with no shirt on” when LØLØ describes sending somebody a photograph of herself in her underwear and then having to live with the silence that follows. It’s the sort of detail you’d omit when telling friends how a relationship went wrong, replacing it with something more dignified.
– WORDS BY CJ
LØLØ has put it in a song. She even remembers arguing with herself about whether she could get away with it. “I remember writing that and chuckling to myself thinking ‘I can’t actually put this out… that would be weird …. but….what if?’”
LØLØ doesn’t need much distance from an experience to find it ridiculous. There’s no elaborate period of recovery before the comedy kicks in, no moment years later when she suddenly recognizes that the worst evening of her life was also pretty funny. “I’m constantly laughing at myself in the moment,” she tells JAMBALOO. “I’m usually half crying/half laughing from the very get go. I find my own patheticness to be quite amusing I guess.” You can hear that instinct throughout her records. She has an impressive talent for recording the precise second when heartbreak gives way to behavior that, under any other circumstances, she would advise a friend against.
Her second album, god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!, arrived in April through Fearless Records, thirteen songs whose titles alone suggest a person with a fairly crowded emotional life. “the dumbest girl in the world,” “hung up on u,” “delusional darling,” “lobotomy & u”: even the punctuation seems exhausted by the situations she’s describing. Compared with 2024’s falling for robots & wishing i was one, the new record is sparer in places, allowing her writing to sit closer to the surface. The pop-punk impulses are still there, but they’re rubbing shoulders with acoustic guitars and songs that feel uncomfortably like reading something intended for one person rather than an audience.
There was a time when she felt obliged to make herself sound a little less unreasonable. “I think during my last album, I was a lot more careful to make myself seem ‘normal’,” she says. “But for this record I stopped caring about that perception and started being a lot more honest with myself (and the listeners).” It’s quite a funny admission from somebody who has already released an album about wishing she were a robot, although she has a point. Even the most merciless breakup song can quietly rearrange the evidence so that its narrator comes out looking admirable. LØLØ is increasingly happy to show you the messages she shouldn’t have sent, along with the spectacularly flimsy logic that convinced her to send them.
“Because in real life, so many of us ARE jealous, obsessive, delusional or pathetic and that’s okay!” she continues. It’s worth dwelling on that last bit. Her new songs don’t offer a neat rehabilitation of the person doing these things. Being able to name a bad impulse doesn’t immediately make it disappear, especially when romance is involved. In “delusional darling,” she gives a wonderfully affectionate name to the business of explaining away somebody else’s disinterest. A person can be busy, stressed, confused, bad at replying, temporarily distracted by any number of imaginary emergencies. All of these possibilities are preferable to the obvious one, at least for another twenty minutes.
LØLØ has become kinder toward the person who once believed those explanations, though kindness has apparently done nothing to diminish her capacity for embarrassment. “I’ve got a knack for embarrassing myself but I’ve learned to be sympathetic towards myself for sure,” she says. She remembers feeling as though nobody else could possibly be making the same mistakes, and punishing herself accordingly. Now she knows better. That knowledge comes partly from the extraordinary experience of performing intensely private thoughts in front of people who can sing every word back to her. Imagine confessing something you barely wanted to tell your closest friend, only to discover a room full of strangers who apparently did exactly the same thing last Tuesday.
“It always brings such a different feeling when I’m singing these songs on tour,” she says. “It’s nice to know that I’m not going through any of these things alone, and I’m not as crazy as I originally thought I was in feeling these particular feelings.” This is a much more entertaining version of the communal healing people like to attribute to live music. An audience of LØLØ fans is, among other things, an unusually large sample of people who have sent regrettable messages and spent whole afternoons inventing explanations for unanswered ones. Everybody gets to laugh, including the person who started it.
For somebody routinely filed under pop-punk, LØLØ doesn’t seem especially interested in honoring the category. You can understand why the description follows her around. Her choruses have a way of turning an emotionally undignified moment into something people can shout, and there’s a pleasingly bratty streak to the way she refuses to soften a line for politeness. But she isn’t trying to rebuild the musical world of anybody’s adolescence. “I try to not even think of genres while I’m making music,” she says. “I think that I just want to create music that lends best to whatever lyrical concept I’m trying to bring to life.” She’s happy enough to be welcomed into that community; she just doesn’t want the label making creative decisions for her.
There’s another complication, considerably more dangerous to a songwriter with two albums full of romantic calamity. LØLØ is happy. Properly happy, by the sound of it, although she’s managed to find a suitably LØLØ-shaped anxiety buried inside the good news. “At the present, I am very happy and sometimes that scares me,” she says. “And what scares me even more is the thought that I could somehow self sabotage my own happiness in order to write more songs.” She laughs off the immediate concern by pointing out that she has plenty of previous trauma to draw upon, which must be one of the stranger advantages of having had a terrible time in the past.
It raises a worthwhile question about what happens when an artist becomes known for a particular kind of emotional honesty. Audiences have their favorite version of a songwriter, and that version isn’t necessarily the person the songwriter wants to remain. LØLØ has already begun experimenting with happy love songs, and she’s curious about where else her writing might go. If the next batch finds her less heartbroken, it’s unlikely to find her any less dramatic. “I’ve always been very dramatic, ever since I was a little kid,” she tells us. “I tend to feel things very hard and intensely, so even normal life sometimes feels like a movie.” The emotional weather may have improved; the forecasting system remains unchanged.
As the shows grow and more people become involved in her career, she is conscious of another form of editing, one that happens outside the studio. Teams, styling, direction and everybody’s well-intentioned ideas about who LØLØ ought to be are part of the job now.
She’s grateful for those contributions, but suspicious of arriving at a version of herself so carefully assembled that she no longer recognizes it. “I never want LØLØ to become this perfectly packaged version of myself that doesn’t actually exist,” she says. Considering how many of her best songs depend on exposing the bits most people would rather keep hidden, it would be an especially perverse outcome if success required concealing them again.
She suspects heartbreak will always be her “bread and butter,” and you wouldn’t bet against it. Romantic misery has served her remarkably well, even if the actual experience was considerably less enjoyable than the songs it produced. But there’s no need to manufacture another disaster just to keep the material coming. People in happy relationships are quite capable of doing stupid things, thinking embarrassing thoughts and creating problems where none existed. LØLØ has spent two records proving herself exceptionally good at noticing all of that, particularly in herself. She might yet make a happy record. Whether she can get through one without embarrassing herself is another question.
