“If you’ve been to a Lola Young concert, before you know how this goes,” Lola Young told the crowd on Monday night. “It’s a shambles, the talking bit’s a shambles, the whole shebang’s a shambles, and it just goes on and on for a bit too long.”
She’s selling herself short. If there was ever an excuse to go out and party on a Monday, Young would be it. Her biggest song, Messy, has gone viral. She’s been nominated for a Brit Award – and performed at the show. She’s spent four weeks at number one. Her star is not so much on the rise as careening through the outer atmosphere.
All this in the space of a few months, so it’s no surprise that Kentish Town Forum felt a tad intimate for an artist of her wattage. And no surprise that the crowd were so impatient to see her that they started chanting her name even before she came on.
When she did, it was with all the force of a supernova. Young excels at distilling the messy, chaotic days of early twenties life into music dynamite; her odes to disappointing lovers, toxic relationships and mental health has made her into something approaching a Gen Z sage.
A Gen Z sage with an ability to twerk, which she did plenty of times during the set. Rather sweetly, the screens behind her head displayed her name at all times, like she was playing a small stage at a festival. They weren’t needed, obviously: we all knew who we were here to see.
First up, we had the punky Good Books, which was swiftly followed by the equally bratty Wish You Were Dead, where she exchanged lines with the crowd – who bellowed along, word perfect.
“This next song… my label didn’t like the title,” she exclaimed impishly, before launching into Fuck.
But it wasn’t all flicking fingers up to metaphorical exes and bad boys. Halfway through the set, Young took centre stage for a slow, sad song that showcased her stupendous vocal range. When she let rip halfway through, it was with an anguished roar that felt like it had been pulled from the depths of her guts.
We also got a poetry reading, which alluded to Young’s mental health struggles. “There are moments like this. Moments were I really feel alive. Usually they happen here, in front of all of you, but the rest are so few and far between I couldn’t name them without some thought,” she told us. You could have heard a pin drop for parts of it; the crowd was mesmerised.
And despite careening from profound to punchy, the set never felt uneven: a testament to her skill as a performer. She pulled out all the hits: Big Brown Eyes, which Young declared “always makes me feel sexy” and which was performed with a half-snarl; Crush, whose sickly-sweet chords segued into something more frantic and claustrophobic. And Conceited, of course, which she performed with an eye-roll and a wink to the heads bopping along in the audience.
Throughout, she took to the stage to chat to the crowd, making the whole event feel like a casual open-mic night in the local pub, even if she did sometimes speak too quickly to be understood. “I’ve finished my new album,” she explained, after wrapping up the easy-breezy Walk On By. “It’s incredible. Better than the last one, actually.”
When she left the stage, it was to thunderous cheers – only for her to sprint back on for the two-act encore, which included mega-hits What Is It About Me? and Messy, which she delivered with a message to the haters: “anybody who calls me a one-hit wonder… can f**k off!”
She’s certainly anything but that. Now when’s that next album coming out?
