Lola Young Proves She’s a Bona Fide Rock Star in a Bravura Return to the Stage at L.A.’s Orpheum: Concert Review

How many phenomenal young British female singers can one world withstand? It’s hard to imagine a more enjoyable onslaught than the wave that has brought us Olivia Dean, Raye and Sienna Spiro, among other standouts — and, of course, Lola Young, who may count as the edgiest of this commercially and artistically compelling crop. She got a little too close to the edge, last year, and had to take a time-out that interrupted her tour and put other promotional activities on pause. Now she is in resumption mode, with a live show that would have been worth waiting years, not just six months, to see. Her show Monday night at L.A.’s Orpheum was enough of a wow to make you wish we could turn the clock back on the Grammy race for best new artist — not to overturn the verdict, because Dean is great, too, but to somehow maneuver the results into, like… a tie? Young at least merits a piece of that same glory, and with the fierce determination she’s bringing to her performance right now, it seems like a surety she’s going to get it.

Her Orpheum show was something of a one-off — one of two U.S. dates she was doing, following a gig at South by Southwest last week (or one of three, if you count her being the guest performer at Elton John’s Oscar-night AIDS benefit). She has a half-dozen dates after this scheduled for the U.K. in June, and then it’s a bit of a mystery where her 2026 regeneration goes from there. The lack of a real tour itinerary just adds to the fun of the speculation that immediately comes to mind when you’re watching an artist with this kind of prowess and seemingly inevitable draw, who doesn’t have a lot of big stateside shows under her belt. Will she play Crypto.com Arena someday? Or maybe top out at a two-nights-at-the-Greek level? That’s getting a bit ahead of things, since Young has a long way to go in her American notoriety catching up with her already saturation-level appeal back home. But the rapidity with which her gig-specific T-shirts sold out at the Orpheum made it clear that everyone who procured tickets through the lottery system intends on bragging about it in years to come.

All the adoring Yanks were ready to appoint her queen on the spot, but queen of what? Sadness, for the most part — along with whatever emotionally unqualified superlatives you want to come up with for her voice. Don’t take it from us, you can take it from Young herself. “You’re a sweet baby / I’m a sad, sad lady,” she avows, offering something close to a mission statement in her ballad “Post Sex Clarity.” There’s something slightly arch and self-knowing about the way she uses the word “lady” there, but there aren’t many LOL lines in her songwriting, or any of the slight tendency toward camp that lightened up Amy Winehouse’s appeal a little as she was on the rise. With no big hair or girl-group motifs or other affects to fall back on, Young just seems as serious as a heart attack when she’s singing about her heart being on the skids. On stage at the Orpheum, she didn’t give the audience a token mood-breaking smile for quite a while. A colleague texted: “Is it me, or does it seem like she’s not enjoying herself?” It was a reasonable question, if you didn’t necessarily have reason to believe in Young’s commitment to the bit — the “bit” being her investment in the real emotions of some of her tougher tunes. Resting Lola Face can look a bit glum, but that befit the material, at least until she warmed and rowdied things up more in the set’s second half.

Her 65-minute performance began with two solo acoustic numbers — “Bad Game (3 AM),” for which she sat at the piano, and “Walk All Over You,” on which she accompanied herself on guitar — before a couple of band members sequentially emerged to join her for the (still acoustic) “Why Do I Feel Better When I Hurt You?” and “Sad Sob Story! :).” The message: hurt people hurt people, as they say, and Young is not above boomeranging some bad karma back to whoever’s treated her poorly. In Young’s Monday night telling, all of this felt raw and close to the surface and not like emo shtick at all. Her voice was mostly low and only occasionally given to moments of belting, with a conversational drift that almost made it seem like she was about to bridge jazz and hip-hop. Woundedness and anger felt good in a place like this, even as Young gave no quarter on any chit-chat or grins that would assure the audience she was just kidding.

Then, with song #5, “Penny Out of Nothing,” the full band was finally in full sway, with a boomy arrangement that put the throb to her sob. The set wasn’t exactly the model of full-blown levity from then on, but seats were heartily abandoned to make it an SRO gig, and Young began to let everyone know that, in fact, she was pleased with the eruptions of love coming her way. She did break into a smile as she was about to launch into “d£aler.” It wasn’t clear what might’ve been amusing to her about the start of this song, but maybe it was occurring to her that it was funny to be bringing out a really, really catchy song that says she wants to “pack my bags, my drugs, and disappear… tell my dealer I’ll miss him” at a time when she’s just told the world (in a Rolling Stone cover story) that she was off the road dealing with addiction issues and needs to stay clean. (Apparently, they tried to make her go to rehab and she said yes, yes, yes.)

That was followed with a more obvious occasion to laugh, “Big Brown Eyes,” which Young said is her favorite song to sing in the show, because it’s an upbeat number that deals with her addiction to guys with, yes, brown eyes. The fact that she has green eyes herself, she noted, does not dissuade her from this at all. “Fuck blue eyes,” she declared. “Fuck green eyes.” Duly noted by possible future suitors, surely. A few songs later, at the beginning of the encore, she delved more seriously into what she’d want out of a partner, introducing “You Noticed” as the saddest song of the show. In those lyrics, she is spending time with the significant other of her dreams — the first person to ever see her as she wants to be seen — and that giver is unavailable in any area except the friendzone. You could have said that this is actually one of the more hopeful songs in Young’s three-album catalog (such a person exists!), but she doesn’t see it that way. She is doomed to be stuck with the kind of sod represented in the inevitable show-closer, her signature song, “Messy,” who always wants her to be the exact opposite of what she is in that moment. And with that, the audience left her as they found her an hour earlier, except for the singer now being nearly gushy with her gratitude and the stampede of praise getting louder to match.

Although you wouldn’t qualify Young’s music as strictly rock, genre-wise, by any means, it sure felt like a rock show, in much the same way that Chappell Roan’s does, as stylistically far apart as they otherwise are. That’s due in part to the guitar-heavy band Young has assembled, which is in turn likely due to the move slightly in that direction on her third and most recent album, “I’m Only F**king Myself.” She and her ensemble had heads nodding along to a power ballad like “Spiders” or just melting to the brief but powerfully fuzzy guitar solo that ended her narcissist-baiting “Conceited.” The climactic “Not Like That Anymore,” which is practically a bopping new-wave/power-pop rocker, contains the line “I was a sad little bitch” — as something she aspires to get over, not quite a point of pride. Amid this momentarily raucous atmosphere, she invited the audience to scream “bitch!” at her, even as she made it clear that no one else in her life would ever be allowed to again. And the crowd was of course OK with this moment of mirroring: It takes one to know one.

Talk of instrumentation aside, there’s no instrument on stage like Young’s voice, which doesn’t sound quite like anyone else’s — it’s the sound of a confidante, one who can wail but is going to be sparing about that. And it’s a sound you have the urge to protect at any price, for all the generations’ worth of fulfillment we’re likely to get out of it.

Young seemed to be thinking about that when she gave a brief acknowledgement at the end of what was going on with her when she went away for a bit, not all of it audible above the crowd’s cheering. “I’m takin’ care of myself for you guys,” she said, and those eight words were really all anybody needed to hear. With a tour schedule that still hasn’t been much filled in at this point, it would appear she might be stepping back into the limelight with some care toward her recovery, as it should be … even if you’d wish the whole world of concertgoers could quickly get a show like a couple of thousand people in L.A. just got. She may be messy, but she cleans up real good,. So here’s to a lifetime of records and shows that find the right balance between the emotional dishevelment fans have already learned to love and some seriously well-earned triumph.

The Orpheum show was opened with a lively and fun set from Sofia and the Antoinettes, a group that skews even more cleanly toward rock-leaning indie-pop, fronted by a charismatic singer whose poise, platinum blonde ‘do and short white skirt give her the aura of someone who has her shit together, even as her lyrics insist she does not. Highlights included “Introspection,” a stream-of-consciousness anxiety song that the Derbyshire-born Sofia said was inspired by some time she spent in Los Angeles, taking in the city’s dissociative prompts. Perhaps a move is in order.