LØLØ Chronicles the Human Condition with Honest Songwriting

LØLØ, who comes to House of Blues on Saturday, Oct. 21, to support Boys Like Girls on the Speaking Our Language Tour, is used to being the only girl on pop-punk tours.

The Toronto-native’s first major tour opportunity was with established pop-punk heroes New Found Glory. She credits NFG lead singer Chad Gilbert, who discovered her music on a Spotify playlist, as having a huge hand in her blossoming career.

“It’s really cool to tour with people who are so experienced, when it’s my first rodeo in a lot of these situations,” says LØLØ in a recent Zoom interview. “I literally owe Chad Gilbert my entire life. [Without New Found Glory], I wouldn’t have started touring, became much more confident, and learned so much. He was there every step of the way, every day before we went on, talking to me, giving me advice.”

Now, LØLØ is seeing more faces in the crowd singing her lyrics back to her and longer lines to meet her at the merch table when she books opening slots. She can’t wait for the Boys Like Girls Tour that brings her to Cleveland. Presented by Emo Nite, the show will kick off with LØLØ followed by State Champs, the Summer Set, Every Avenue and finally Boys Like Girls.

The lengthy lineup aims to recapture a bit of the Warped Tour magic for fans of the alternative genre. But LØLØ is no stranger to that scene, as she was on the Sad Summer Festival lineup that landed at Jacob’s Pavilion last summer.

“I’ve been really lucky with my tours, because I’m always the newbie, and everyone’s been so kind to me, it’s almost shocking,” says LØLØ. “It just keeps getting better and better, every time I meet someone that I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’ and they are so nice to me and so welcoming. I’m definitely gonna pass on this good karma and be really nice to whoever opens for me one day.”

LØLØ got her start playing open mics in Toronto. She loved singing and performing from a young age, and she began playing guitar her freshman year of high school. Her guitar teacher encouraged her to stop ripping up the pages of her journal, so her parents wouldn’t read her deepest thoughts and feelings and commit to writing songs. Once the floodgates opened, writing songs was all she wanted to do.

It's the alternative artist’s brutally honest songwriting that led her to being welcomed into the pop-punk community with open arms.

The singer-songwriter showcases this skill with ease in songs like 2021’s “lonely & pathetic,” which LØLØ wrote during one of the several Canadian lockdowns she endured in the peak of the COVID pandemic, before moving to L.A.

“I started just laughing to myself like, ‘Wow, it’s been months, and I’m sad and depressed about this guy again. As a joke, I just played on guitar in my bed, ‘Guess who’s lonely and pathetic, lonely and pathetic, lonely and pathetic, again,’” says LØLØ. “Then I was like, ‘There’s something to that. It’s kind of funny. So, I ended up bringing it into the studio with my two Toronto producers.”

The rest of the song was born from a fun, casual studio session. LØLØ confides that “Lonely & Pathetic” is the only song she has ever written and recorded while drunk, and she thinks it shows.

“I felt like that was the first time that I was really showing my personality through my music,” says LØLØ. “It was fun to release it, because before then I had been a lot more serious. I don’t want to be serious. I’m not a serious person.’”

Just as much of a depressive anthem, but a bit more refined, “death wish” finds LØLØ wondering why everything she touches seems to break.

Following a particularly hard breakup, her grandmother got her a plant which she almost immediately killed.

“Within a week, the plant was dead. The plant was gone. I was really trying to take care of it,” says LØLØ. “And I was like, ‘I can’t even keep a plant alive. How am I ever supposed to succeed in this life?'”

LØLØ’s catalogue is full of upbeat laments chronicling the human condition with guitar-heavy production, but she also loves stripped-down songs. All LØLØ’s songs start with her just playing guitar in bed, so she likes to keep some of them in their rawest form.

Released in 2020, “Dear First Love,” is a heart wrenching ballad about never fully being able to shake the soft spot you have for the first person you were in a romantic relationship with.

The concept was born from LØLØ passing a bus stop where the words “what was the name of your first love?” had been written.

“I always want to put out more songs like that, but people want from me this pop-rock more up-tempo thing, which I love doing— don’t get me wrong. I’m happy that most of my songs are like that, because when I have concerts, I love jumping around and going crazy,” says LØLØ. “I don’t think I would want to just sit down and play for 30 minutes. I want to rock out.”

Nonetheless, LØLØ has been working on lots of new music, including several stripped-down ballads that she hopes to include on her debut full-length album. With an album, LØLØ explains, there are enough songs on the track list for the fun, upbeat ones and the slow ones to coexist, where there is more pressure to exclusively put out songs with the potential to be marketed as singles when you are releasing in short form.

In the meantime, LØLØ is enjoying life on tour.

“I’m this girl from Canada, going across the U.S. like, ‘Oh my God, how do they know me here? This is crazy,” says LØLØ. “I really only care about connecting with people and people knowing my music.”

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