London-born singer Lola Young has secured her second week at number one with TikTok viral song ‘Messy’, which marks her first ever song to chart in the UK after years of working in the music industry. In an exclusive interview with Official Charts ahead of her second performance on The Graham Norton Show, the singer has shared her excitement and said:
“I want to say thank you so much for making Messy Number 1 on the Official Chart! I love you all so much, you guys mean the absolute world to me. I’m so happy!”
‘Messy’ scored its second week topping charts with 6.2 million streams over the last seven days.
We were feeling Messy and caught @lolayounggg backstage at @TheGNShow to give her her Number 1 Award
Read more: https://t.co/6EyjSmWdMRpic.twitter.com/QpDv9NOiZI
— Official Charts (@officialcharts) January 31, 2025
24 years old Young first rose to fame in 2021, when her cover of Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Together In Electric Dreams’ became the soundtrack for John Lewis’s Christmas commercial of that year; in the same year, she was nominated for a BRITs Rising Star Award and the following year, in 2022, she was placed at number four on the BBC’s Sound of the Year list.
Young’s debut album, released in 2019, is titled ‘Intro‘ and it was followed by several singles and EPs. In 2023, her second album ‘My Mind Wanders and Sometimes Leaves Completely‘ was released; despite failing to appear in the Official Album Charts, the album peaked at 37 on the Official Physical Albums Chart which looks at the amount of physical copies of an album sold rather than streaming units.
The chart-topping single ‘Messy’ was released as the lead single for Young’s latest release, an 11-tracks album titled ‘This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway‘, which will likely make its debut on Official Albums Charts in the upcoming weeks. The album has in fact re-entered the Official Albums Download Charts a couple of weeks ago, after it first debuted at number 75 upon its release.
In a recent interview with BBC, Young has shared the backstory of the song and stated it was really personal to here, saying:
“The response has been amazing and it’s been really exciting to see all the love that Messy has been receiving, I love the song, it’s a song I wrote that’s really personal and really important to me. So I’m really happy that it’s resonating so much.”
In the same interview, she then went on to say that the meaning of the song is contradictory, and the it feels like “basically like you’re not enough for somebody and also in turn not enough for yourself”.
