LØLØ’s diaristic second album is one for fans of catchy choruses, feeling your feelings and trying to fix emotionally unavailable men.
If you’ve ever had your heart put through a shredder amid the shitstorm of modern dating, LØLØ sees you. She’s been you. Above all, she’s not just lived to tell the tale but mined it for creative gold.
‘If you tell me sick, dark, dirty lies / I’m going to turn them into rhymes,’ she shrugs across the breezy acoustic strumming of the title-track. To quote the title of her 2024 debut, she’s still falling for robots but no longer wishing she was one and now, on the follow-up, she’s owning the mess she makes when the tidal wave of her feelings overrides her logic.
The Toronto singer-songwriter otherwise known as Lauren Mandel has given herself no room to hide, neither emotionally nor sonically, and her music is all the better for it. Certain songs take on a softer, poppier texture, such as the vulnerable me with no shirt on, which nails the pain of a love interest’s unexpected withdrawal and the intertwined denial and desperation that evokes. Behind the candyfloss-sweet guitar-pop of stuff like that lies both infatuation and anxiety. ‘I’ve got to cover all my bases / Prepare for all the just-in-cases,’ she sings of the mental gymnastics she’s doing. whiskey and coke, meanwhile, strikes a dreamier tone as Lauren imagines being wanted and reached for like her crush’s beverage of choice.
It means that when she chooses to properly rock out, her louder moments feel twice as punchy. the dumbest girl in the world is a fizzy, albeit acid-tongued, moment of self-skewering which offers one of the record’s most larger-than-life moments, and every slash of the guitar on delusional darling adds a touch of drama as Lauren mocks her every trip and fall into delusion. ‘He’s so in love, but he’s just busy,’ she sings, ‘Such a hard worker, he’s always on his phone when I talk.’ Later, the jagged american zombie is a perfectly pitched satire of loving an edgy, emotionally stunted man with a heart ‘as black as his coffee’.
Of course, there’s oodles of fun to be had with this album, but within LØLØ’s cocktail of self-deprecation and wit is a huge shot of raw truth. Upon hitting play, you will find someone who just gets it. The lesson to be learned, within both life and art, is that spitting out your feelings is always the best ploy.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Avril Lavigne, Olivia Rodrigo, Karen Dió
god forbid a girl spits out her feelings! is released on April 17 via Fearless.
