For years, pop-rock powerhouse LØLØ tried to outrun her emotions. Her 2025 debut album falling for robots & wishing i was one was built on the fantasy of shutting down completely—no feelings, no vulnerability, no chance of getting hurt. “My debut album had me wishing I could be a robot,” she says over a call with Melodic Magazine. “[god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!], however, is what happens when I start embracing every messy, scary, and inconvenient feeling of being human.”
That shift became god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!, out April 17 via Fearless Records. The record is a stripped‑back unraveling of everything she once tried to hide. “Every song is diaristic, ripped straight from the pages of my journal, chronicling every intrusive or delusional thought, every downward spiral that goes on in the labyrinth I call my mind,” she says. “It’s me, spilling my guts in real time to cope.”
But LØLØ didn’t get to this era of emotional honesty easily. For most of her life, she kept her thoughts locked away in journals, convinced they were never meant for anyone else. When her guitar teacher first told her to try writing a song, she flat‑out refused. “My diary entries, the public? No thank you,” she says. “The thought of someone else knowing my deepest inner thoughts made me want to die.” But her teacher pushed her, playfully threatening not to come back unless she tried. So she sat on her bed with a notepad, wrote one song, and then six more. “I was obsessed,” she says. The practice made her realize, “this is what I wanna do.”
Before she ever became LØLØ, she was just Lauren Mandel—until a boss at her first job casually started calling her “Lolo” and the nickname stuck. She tried to use her real name as her artistic identity, but another Lauren Mandel (a writer on Saturday Night Live) already owned the Instagram handle and website address. Fans who saw the credits for Sabrina Carpenter’s episode of SNL even briefly thought she’d helped Sabrina write a sketch. “I fucking wish,” she laughs. Then, she discovered another artist already performing as Lolo. “She’s the most awesome, sweetest girl,” LØLØ says. “But she already was a Lolo and I was like, ‘Okay, I don’t wanna get sued.’ So, I added those slashes.”
LØLØ’s new album grew out of the realizations she had while touring her first one. Throughout that process, she slowly realized that shutting down wasn’t actually protecting her. “As I wrote that album, and then especially as I toured it, I realized that we do feel things, but at least we get to feel them together,” she says. “And that’s what makes us human.” She still loves the tin-foil covered robot prop she brought on her past tours—he’s even coming back this year, maybe with a tiara—but her desire to shut down has softened.
LØLØ spent years building awareness as an opening act for other artists—grinding through supporting slots for bands like Simple Plan, New Found Glory, and other pop-punk heavyweights. It was safe there. Comfortable. Low pressure. “I got so lucky that I got to open for so many different people and amazing bands,” she says. So when her team told her it was time to headline, she panicked. “I didn’t know if I had fans,” she confesses. “There’s no way to really know if people are actually gonna buy your tickets until you try.” She kept asking for “just one more opening tour,” but it was time to take a leap. Thankfully, her first headline run sold out and relief hit her like a wave. “It was the best time ever,” she says. “I was like, wow…I like doing a headline tour so much more than being an opener.” The pressure was heavier, but so was the payoff. “It’s your show, so it’s all the pressure in the world,” she says. “But it’s also all of the reward.” The fear that once kept her from stepping into the spotlight became the exact thing that made it worth it.
It wasn’t until opening night of her tour in Leeds, England that everything snapped into focus. LØLØ could hear the crowd screaming as her intro rolled, and all she could think was, “Oh my God, this is crazy.” She imagined her younger self, the shy kid dancing in the basement to Green Day’s American Idiot and Hilary Duff practicing for this moment. “I’d picture her looking up at me, being like ‘We can’t go out there. I can’t do this,’ and me being like, ‘Nah, we got this,'” she says. “I got on stage and it just made me so emotional because I thought about how I never imagined myself doing that, being able to do this.”
“But now I am able to do this and it’s like a sold-out crowd out there…”
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