My Mind Wanders and Sometimes Leaves Completely

22-year-old Lola Young has one of those voices. You know, the ones that are impossible to ignore: made for smoky dark clubs as much as hushed arenas, it’s got a depth, rawness and huskiness that reduces crowds to pin-drop silence.

Where previous releases have seen Lola interrogating her life with honesty, My Mind Wanders And Sometimes Leaves Completely is a new era for the young singer-songwriter. Love is a theme she’ll always tackle in her music, she says – “it’s the most relatable topic, isn’t it?” – but on this project she’s fully stepped out of her comfort zone, testing her writing ability to confront new topics, while mining new depths of her creativity.

On My Mind Wanders And Sometimes Leaves Completely, Lola set out with the idea that no one is two-dimensional, or perfect. Armed with that vocal that switches between soft and strong at a moment’s notice, Lola uses a folk storytelling and diaristic style to offer the listener a front seat to immersive snapshots of her life. “It’s my journey towards being a woman and figuring out who I am,” she says. “There’s a lot of references to people telling me I won’t make it [in the music industry]. It’s almost me talking to myself, addressing the difficulties you go through growing up, your insecurities.”

Dealing with themes such as love bombing, gaslighting, body image and depression among others, it’s a relatable listen for any young person growing up today. It’s peppered with vivid details, like her ex buying her a record to play on her birthday – “don’t even listen to punk, do you know me?” she sings on “Semantic Situation”), and someone saying she needed to read a book titled How To Be Happy, “and I think that was a bit of a dig” (“Revolve Around You”).