Prioritise Pleasure is the Guardian’s album of the year. How do you feel? It’s fucking cool, innit [laughs loudly]. My PR told me at my gig in Manchester and then just walked off, like the ultimate mic drop. Also, I’ve done the double as well, with the single of the year. Amazing. Did you expect the album to break through in the way it has? No. I’d absolutely made my peace with being told I’m underrated. But I also don’t feel like things have massively changed – I still feel like I will be fighting for ever. But I get my own Travelodge room [on tour] now and – I’m not joking – that’s bliss to me. Before I was always sharing. Why do you think the album connected in the way it did? I keep doing this joke that everyone’s as depressed as me now because of the pandemic, so maybe it’s that. I used to feel very alone and I couldn’t understand why I found everything so difficult. On this album I’m starting to feel like, certainly for women, or for people who struggle not to live the perfect 2.4 children dream, it’s society that’s caused it to be shit for us. I think a lot of people are realising that as well, and maybe I’m vaguely eloquent enough to make sense of it all. A few months after your debut Compliments Please came out, you were worried about whether or not you even could make a second album. It had been a risk to do [Self Esteem], and I felt so accomplished, actually, on that first record. Then I was hearing “Hmm, but it didn’t really sell and no money was made” from the label. Are you kidding? All this work hasn’t been enough? That feeling of “maybe I’ll get dropped” was horrible but it managed to thicken my skin and I realised I wanted to do this regardless. I was prepped and ready to do [a second album] anyway, but then I didn’t get dropped. When did you start writing it? I did How Can I Help You at the end of 2019. Then I wrote a lot of it at the start of 2020 and spent the whole pandemic listening to the demos just ready to make it. I had to just sit and think about it longer than usual. How Can I Help You is pretty ferocious – what inspired it? Not being Mercury-nominated for the first album really hurt. Also, then nearly getting dropped and dealing with constant tweets from people going: “You’re so underrated; why does no one know who you are?” I was so sick of it. Was it important to have the lyrics be pretty plain-speaking and direct? I think so. I was in an indie band [Slow Club] for so long and I remember wanting to say really simple things I felt, but to get it OK’d I would have to deploy a metaphor or think about how Bob Dylan would say it [laughs]. So my lyrics sound like they do now because I’m not having to get it through someone else’s lens any more. When I was younger I’d get my disposable cameras developed and none of my pictures would be of the scenery or any cool things I saw, it was all just my friends. All I care about are people and the things they do. I’m interested in horrible life, and lyrics are the horrible life bit for me. There’s a black humour to some of the songs – is comedy an inspiration when it comes to lyric writing? No, not really. I’ve definitely curated a kind of [does a goofy voice] “I’m funny” thing to survive being a woman, and it seeps into who I am. It also is who I am. But it’s sort of the last level for me when it comes to things I need to stop doing. Gaga doesn’t have to do jokes! It naturally comes out of me because that’s just me, but I think it’s when I feel like people expect it that it pisses me off. Was I Do This All the Time – Guardian critics’ top song of 2021 – always going to be the first single? It wasn’t even going to be on the record! I work with another guy sometimes and I played the demo to him and he said: “Well, it’s long” [laughs]. But I always loved it. The way it went down [with the public] was unreal. Since April my life’s changed, basically, in terms of people liking what I’m doing. They get it. The knot in my stomach untied. The last line is: ‘We laid there in the darkness and you were asleep / And I wasn’t checking my phone for a moment and I felt–’ Why does it cut off unfinished? It’s a sort of mid-paragraph idea, like it could all just end at any moment. I live in a very stressed-out way, with lots of what-ifs. Life is long, or it isn’t, and both of those ideas scare me. My therapist is always begging me to find the middle ground. If I violently push myself to the middle then I find this weird peace but I have to really crowbar it into my mindset because it does not come naturally. The album touches on the idea of being perceived as too much – is its vast sound a way of exorcising those criticisms? I don’t want it to be the album you put on at a dinner party. I’ve always been background music. Producers would always say: “Can you do it again but a little bit softer?” I don’t want my songs to sound like I’m in a dress doing “shoop shoop bedoo” any more. Also, I am over the top. I like things that are loud and big and direct. Does it feel better in terms of your own mental wellbeing to have this success later in your career? One hundred percent. I do believe there’s something cool about being 35 doing this. In my quieter moments I sometimes feel a bit stupid, and I’m like: “Do I look ridiculous?” But even me asking that question is why I’m doing this. Why on earth are we put out to pasture at 30? I got plenty of comments from nasty men on the internet going “You’ve left it too late”, but I fucking haven’t. Your moniker was sort of about wish-fulfilment – if I put it out there in the world it will happen. Do you think you’re getting there now? It comes in and out. These past six months I have been very emotional. I’m really used to knowing why but I don’t know why this time. I think it might be that something is happening in me where I think I might love myself, finally. And that just makes me cry loads, but in a beautiful way. It just feels like there’s no going back now, and life will throw all sorts of shit but I finally feel like I’m on an even playing field with people who don’t suffer with this bullshit. I feel limitless.