In an era where pop music often feels polished to a mirror shine—auto-tuned to perfection and sanitized for TikTok algorithms—an artist like Lola Young feels like a necessary punch to the gut. The British singer-songwriter has been steadily building a cult following, and with the release of her project This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway , she has cemented her status as one of the most vital voices of her generation.
When you finally extract that folder onto your desktop, do not just shuffle it. Pour a glass of something strong. Put on headphones. Hit play from track one. Let the grit, the poetry, and the sheer volume of her emotion wash over you.
The album draws heavily from 90s trip-hop (Massive Attack, Portishead) and early 2000s UK garage. It is a distinctly British record. It smells like rain on concrete, cheap red wine, and the inside of a night bus at 3 AM. It is interesting to note that successful mainstream pop stars rarely have fans hunting for zip files of their work. Taylor Swift fans stream. Beyoncé fans buy vinyl. But Lola Young fans? They want the raw files. They want the demo versions included in the zip. They want the album art embedded as a 2000x2000 pixel JPEG.
Lola Young does not write songs to make you feel better. She writes them to make you feel seen . She validates the ugliest parts of your psyche—the jealousy, the rage, the deep exhaustion of having to perform happiness.
The album oscillates between spoken-word poetry, punk-inflected screaming, and devastatingly fragile ballads. It is an exploration of toxic relationships, body dysmorphia, class anxiety in London, and the peculiar loneliness of being a young woman in your twenties. While the entire project is cohesive, three tracks stand out as absolute gut-punches:
– A scathing acoustic takedown of a friend-turned-foe. Lola’s East London accent is on full display here, stripping away the Americanized transatlantic drawl that plagues modern pop. It sounds like a pub argument that turned into a eulogy.