LØLØ Sharpens Her Pop-Punk Edge on New EP ‘debbie downer’

 

☆ BY Makena Alquist ☆

 
 

EVERY EARLY AUGHTS POP-PUNK DEVOTEE — remembers the album that drove them to their first eyeliner purchase. The distinctive aches in lead singers’ vocals as they despair over the eardrum-bursting guitar drives both new fans and returning ones into the pop-punk scene. In her new EP, debbie downer, singer-songwriter LØLØ both embraces these roots of the genre and brings in her own pop style, creating a carefully cultivated EP that explores the spectrum of pop-punk expression.

Coming from a pure pop background, LØLØ made a point to ensure this EP did not sound too pristine. She spent time with her producers finding the right level of grit in every moment of every song, ultimately creating the perfect amount of imperfection.

“I run into this issue that sometimes my music is too pop for rock or too rock for pop,” LØLØ explains. “So I put the edge on everything on this EP to make it sound uglier … Even in my lyrics I try to make people go, ‘Oh my god, she said that?!’” 

This meticulous nastiness shows itself off best on all of the high-energy songs on the record. Despite being rewritten an estimated 10 times over, “THE FLOOR IS LAVA!!!!” sounds like an effortless combination of the pop and rock sound.

“I’m so intense about making sure the art is exactly what I want and [with] the lyrics, making sure everything is exactly what I want to say,” LØLØ says. 

Despite the pop influence, debbie downer successfully leans into the emotional core of the pop-punk genre, which for years has been looked to as a respite for the emotionally distraught young person. From the introduction of the character of Debbie in the opening track — who LØLØ portrays in the music video as a high school cheerleader clad in all black, sporting the classic pop-punk set of  fishnets and fingerless gloves — the listener faces the character’s depression, anxiety, and addictions along with her. 

“After I wrote the first song I thought, ‘Oh, Debbie is such a character,’ and obviously it is me the whole time, but it became an interesting exercise from when I didn’t want to face my own demons,” LØLØ explains.

The EP builds on these feelings throughout, reaching its emotional peak on the final song, “asking for a friend,” a powerful ballad about LØLØ’s experience with depression, sung over soft electric guitar. The lyric video was released via YouTube as a fundraiser on World Suicide Prevention Day. 

“I think it’s just really important for these feelings to be talked about in music and mainstream media because it is definitely very isolating when you are going through it,” LØLØ says. “I would just hope that other people can hear that song and know that there's other people going through hard times and that they are not alone … That it's not easy, this thing that we call life, growing up and navigating everything, but we try to get through it.”

In the studio right now working on her next project, LØLØ hopes to explore more of this genre in the future, creating her own pop-rock style.

“I think my music is always going to have a little bit of that edge, because I love all of that rock stuff like Weezer and Avril Lavigne,” she says, “and I’m also a huge Swiftie and I love Julia Michaels, so I’m constantly trying to blend the two.”

She explains that this combination of rock and pop influences have been around since the beginning of her musical journey.

“The first CD that I ever got when I was really little, with my own money that I earned in the basement putting on performances, was American Idiot by Green Day,” she describes. “I would listen to that, then I would listen to my Hillary Duff CD — I feel like that kind of makes sense of what my music is today.”

LØLØ ’s new EP encapsulates this feeling of early 2000s pop blended with early 2000s rock, as she is there both for fans revisiting and people experiencing her music for the first time, with all of the feelings that come along with great pop-punk music.

“I hope it makes you dance,” she says. “I hope it makes you cry. I hope it makes you scream at the top of your lungs.”

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