When we first meet LØLØ, she is just settling in after her recent move from Canada to West LA. It’s a daunting but necessary change for anyone with musical ambitions, but the singer isn’t completely on her own. “My dad was my roommate this month,” she says with a twinge of embarrassment. “Everyone I’ve told that to has been really weirded out. No one wants to hang at my house.” It may not be the coolest look for a 24-year-old artist, but LØLØ seems grateful for the company. “Trying to make friends in L.A. is kind of hard,” she admits, “Especially in the music industry. Everyone has their guard up and it’s hard to know who is actually your friend and who is trying to be your friend to work with you. L.A. is weird, but I do love it here.”
Though LØLØ is still spreading her roots in California, she already has a massive following on social media. You may recognize the artist from her performances on TikTok, most of which involve re-writing popular songs from an alternate perspective. It began with “Hey There, Delilah,” when users of the platform attempted to reimagine the song from Delilah’s perspective. LØLØ’s rendition garnered over 200K views, which inspired the singer to flex her songwriting skills on other tracks. “I tried to take the saddest songs possible, and flip them. ‘Happier’ by Ed Sheeran was the first one that I felt like I needed to rewrite. The words are like, ‘I look at you and you’re happier now.’ But I thought what if the girl wasn’t actually happier? What if she is still missing him? That was my favorite one to rewrite. I always thought that song was so fucking sad.”
Writing melancholy pop anthems is par for the course for LØLØ, who cut her teeth on singer-songwriters like Taylor Swift and Gavin DeGraw. However, there was a time when writing music was the last thing on her mind. As a child, the singer loved to watch classic movie-musicals like The Wizard of Oz, and she dreamed of one day performing on Broadway. She even took tap dancing and acting classes, though she now admits that it wasn’t her strong suit. “I was the cringiest little tap dancer,” she shares with a laugh.
However, by high school, the singer would set her sights on a different career path. LØLØ explains, “My sister started taking guitar lessons, and I thought if she can do it, I can do it.” With a little sibling rivalry as incentive, the singer signed up for lessons. Right away, her guitar teacher recognized her talents as a vocalist and suggested that she write music. Teenage LØLØ was reluctant, to say the least. “I never thought about songwriting,” she reflects. “I was so self-conscious that my mom or dad or someone else would read my diary. I would write out [my feelings], and then rip it up into little pieces.” The thought of sharing her most personal thoughts in song-form was horrifying, but her teacher wasn’t letting her off the hook. He gave the singer an ultimatum: She wouldn’t get any more lessons until she at least tried to write a song. With newfound motivation (and perhaps a little fear) LØLØ went home and wrote not just one, but five songs. It didn’t take long before she was hooked. “I was obsessed with it. Like, wait, this is so cool. From that first day, I knew this is what I want to do with my life. I completely gave up on the Broadway dream and I went gung-ho with wanting to be an artist.”
Step one was adopting a perfect stage name. LØLØ, pronounced “low-low,” is a childhood nickname that just stuck around. “It came from my first boss ever,” she explains, “He gave me the nickname Lolo and then everyone started calling me that. I thought it sounded a lot better than [my given name] Lauren Mandell. Most people call me Lolo unless I’m in trouble with my mom.” And in case the slashes made you wonder: No, she is not Norwegian. The Toronto-born singer explains: “There is another Lolo [in the music industry] and I didn’t want to get sued. That is the only reason.”
It wouldn’t be long before LØLØ experienced her big break. In 2018, she won I Heart Radio Canada’s Future Star competition with her guitar-driven break-up track “Yours.” The song immediately gained traction on Canadian radio and the young singer got her very first taste of stardom. She recalls, “I’d get in the car and hear myself on the radio like five times in one drive. I was automatically in the Top 40.” It was quite literally a dream come true.
“Yours” peaked at #27 on the Canadian charts, and LØLØ was determined to maintain the upward momentum with the release of her debut EP Sweater Collection. The 9-track project cleverly showcased the songwriter’s pop sensibilities, with tracks like the caustic “Convenient” and the radio-ready “Sweater Collection.” Unfortunately, the EP did not achieve the same chart success as its predecessor. LØLØ explains, “I felt like I had to do this pop-pop-pop thing because I needed to get on the radio. I got so obsessed with it. It was shitty because it wasn’t authentic. You have to be authentic, otherwise people see right through your bullshit.”
With her ego properly checked, LØLØ went back to the drawing board. It took a year of soul searching to refine her artistic vision, but she was ultimately able to start making the kind of music that felt authentically hers. In 2020, the singer released three singles- “Dear First Love,” “Dead Inside,” and “Hate U.” The latter, a pop-rock number for getting over your ex, garnered the most attention, affirming what LØLØ knew all along: She wasn’t a pop artist. She wasn’t a rock artist. She was both. And she was damn good at it.
LØLØ’s move into the world of pop-rock was a timely one. The genre has experienced quite a renaissance as of late, with artists like WILLOW and Maggie Lindemann gaining traction on streaming platforms worldwide. “It was kinda pure luck,” the singer explains, “I decided I wanted to do the genre and right after that, it got popular.” However, LØLØ isn’t just trying on the style du jour. Her pop-punk roots run deep. She shares, “The two main people I used to listen to all the time besides Avril [Lavigne] were Hilary Duff and Green Day. I feel like my music truly is an amalgamation of the two. I’m a pop writer, but I want my songs to kick ass.”
Her latest EP overkill certainly does that. The opening track, “deathwish” feels tailor-made for the soundtrack of a classic coming-of-age movie, with lyrics that spell out a self-fulfilling prophecy of doomed romance. “hurt less” and “u look stupid” channel Billie Joe Armstrong with their stomping guitar riffs and biting lyrics. Even the softer moments on the project have an edge, with the closing track “surgery” pleading, “I asked the doctor to cut out the parts of my brain that know your name.” This delightfully macabre sense of humor is one of the best parts of LØLØ’s sound evolution. If Sweater Collection was ear candy, then overkill is a jawbreaker.
As it stands, the pop-punk world is fully on board with LØLØ’s sonic transformation, and there was no greater affirmation of this than when she signed with Hopeless Records back in 2020. The iconic label is home to legends like Sum 41, Taking Back Sunday, The Used, Yellowcard, and New Found Glory, the latter of which invited the singer on their aptly named tour Pop Punk’s Still Not Dead. A more fitting partnership could not have existed at any other label. “This is exactly [the kind of music] I’m doing and this is the perfect label for me,” The singer says. “Before then, I was independent. I had meetings with other labels but I didn’t want to have my choice taken away of what songs I can put out. Because Hopeless is an indie [label] I’m still getting to make decisions and say what I want to do, and they are there to help me.”
One of the most recent fruits of LØLØ’s new business partnership is her single “debbie downer,” an anthem for anyone who has ever felt like they don’t fit in. The track pays homage to the classic 2000s film Bring It On, with a clever twist on the Clover’s signature cheer: “Brr, it’s cold in here. She sucked the life out of your atmosphere. Brr, it’s cold in here. All black everything, sad and weird.” LØLØ reportedly wrote the song in response to a friendship-gone-sour, and despite the melancholy lyrics, it reads like a self-love anthem. It’s about embracing those dark parts that others may not like about you, and being your own cheerleader.
In the music video, LØLØ assembles her own squad of misfits, including fellow rising star Maggie Lindemann, who features on the track. It was a stroke of luck that Lindemann could take part in the project at all. LØLØ explains, “I met [Maggie] in LA in the spring or summer. I got pulled into a writing session for her project and we totally hit it off. We wrote such a great song, which is going to be on her album, and I asked her if she wanted to feature on [“debbie downer.”] She loved it, but the timing didn’t work out, so I was totally prepared to put it out by myself. We had it mixed and mastered. We had uploaded it to Spotify and Apple Music to release. Then, I was filming the music video here in LA and the idea was to get a bunch of my friends to be different high school stereotypes. I thought that would be really funny. So I sent it to her again and said, “Remember this song? Would you want to be in the video?” She actually didn’t reply to me right away, and I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. She hates it.’ But a day later her manager called and said, ‘She wants to be on it. She loved the song.’ So we rewrote the second verse for her part and the rest was history.”
Though “debbie downer” has all the trappings of a killer first single for a full-length project, LØLØ explains that she isn’t into albums at the moment. “I definitely want to do a full length one day, but I feel like EPs are the move just because of the current climate of music. When I put out overkill, that song “surgery” totally got burned. It is one of my favorite songs I have ever written, but because of the length of the project, people don’t see it as much. It doesn’t get on playlists. It had substantially lower streams than the rest of the songs. It’s almost better to put out singles and give each song more visibility. I work so hard on them, and you kind of want to give it the best shot.” Optics aside, there is another reason LØLØ prefers to release EPs: “I’m really a stickler for the theme and the meaning and the story. It’s easier to tell a story and stick to a theme with a smaller body of work.”
Although there is no album on the way, fans of the singer won’t have to wait long for new music. LØLØ recently announced a new single “junkie” coming in April, as well as performances at Journey’s Sad Summer Festival in July and August. Tickets for the latter go on sale on Thursday, March 24th. Until then, you can pre-save “junkie” on both Spotify and Apple Music, and check out LØLØ’s music videos on Youtube.
Interview conducted by AJ Marks and Anna Pollitt via Zoom. Written by the Pop Apologist, Anna Pollitt. This write-up was originally posted to the Popheads subreddit on 03/21/2022. You can view the post here.
Pop Apologist 