Songfacts®:

• "Not Like That Anymore" is Lola Young's raw, honest reflection on breaking free from self-destructive patterns and toxic relationships. She sings about addiction, self-sabotage, and using sex and drugs as stand-ins for love or numbness, or both. But she also resists the tidy Hollywood arc. There's no miraculous rebirth, no sudden clarity. The growth is slow, imperfect, human - like most actual growth tends to be.
• Unlike some of her earlier work, such as "Messy," which feels like eavesdropping on someone mid-crisis, unsure whether to run back or push forward, "Not Like That Anymore" is the sound of the door finally clicking shut. It's a quiet, deliberate refusal to go back, to spiral again, to let those old ghosts throw another party in her head.
• "Not Like That Anymore" marks a turning point in both tone and substance for Lola Young and also sets the thematic tone for her third album, I'm Only F--king Myself (a title which may sound aggressive until you realize it's probably just painfully accurate). The album explores a terrain familiar to anyone who's ever coped by self-destructing: self-hatred, emotional dependence, escapism, and the strange, almost romantic pull of pain. But "Not Like That Anymore" is different because it doesn't just wallow; it climbs, albeit slowly and barefoot, out of the pit.
• Young co-wrote the track with a close-knit crew: her producer Solomonophonic, her guitarist Conor Dickinson, her keyboard player Will "Manuka" Brown, and Carter Lang, who's best known for shaping the moody, emotionally dense soundscapes on SZA's Ctrl and SOS. Together, they crafted a stripped-back production allows Young's storytelling and personality to take center stage.