Lola Young’s Messy hits number one: My songs are as real as it gets

Young is managed by two men who separately worked with Amy Winehouse and Adele, and Young has something in common with those two artists in her combination of fragility and front.

To that, she adds the conversational tone of Lily Allen and the modern pop sensibility and chaotic energy of Charli XCX.

Young’s breakthrough coincided with the reign of Charli’s Brat ethos, which she defined as “a girl who is a little messy, likes to party, maybe says dumb things sometimes, feels herself, and has a breakdown but parties through it”.

Young feels an affinity with that. “I massively do, and I think it’s that thing of empowered women who like to party and be themselves, and that’s really important to me,” she says.

“I guess I come from a different angle – of a less heightened version of that, I guess. It would be more like, ‘I don’t really give a [care], but I also really do’. That’s what I guess I stand by a little bit more.”

Bratpop season will stretch further when Young releases her next album later this year. It is nearly finished and will “dig deeper” than the last, she says. How much deeper can she really dig?

“Quite a lot,” she says. “There’s quite a lot more to say. There’s a lot of other topics and things that have happened to me, and things that I’ve gone through that I want to discuss with people.

“But also things that are a little bit less about love, and about other things that I’ve gone through.”

Now that Messy’s cleaned up, we can expect to see more of Young, and her shiny teeth.