Mabel 'You Can Make the Most Incredible Song and People Will Still Just be Talking About your Tits' - As a best British female Brit award winner and recent inductee into the rarified Spotify Billions Club for 2019 single Don't Call Me Up, stepping back into the limelight should have been smooth sailing for Mabel McVey.

As a best British female Brit award winner and recent inductee into the rarified Spotify Billions Club for 2019 single Don't Call Me Up, stepping back into the limelight should have been smooth sailing for Mabel McVey. But when the mononymously known pop star teased her return on Instagram in March, the message was filled with heavy allusions to the difficulties of what had come before.

- By Lisa Wright - Photographs by Larissa Hofman

As a best British female Brit award winner and recent inductee into the rarified Spotify Billions Club for 2019 single Don't Call Me Up, stepping back into the limelight should have been smooth sailing for Mabel McVey. But when the mononymously known pop star teased her return on Instagram in March, the message was filled with heavy allusions to the difficulties of what had come before.

"I don't know if anyone really knows who they are in their twenties, but the only way for me to start figuring that out was to turn down the noise," she wrote. "I definitely don't have the answers on how to navigate this industry any more, but I do know that it will be a hell of a lot easier with you by my side."

Launched into the spotlight in her late teens, Mabel had her first Top 10 single-2017's Finders Keepers shortly after turning 21. Now 28, the interim years were a steady cycle of make a record, then promote the record, then make the next record, coupled with the even greater pressures of being simultaneously moulded by the industry and judged by the world.

By the end of the release cycle of her second album About Last Night, in 2022, she felt completely disconnected from herself.

All these opinions about the way you look, all these things that come with being a female pop star- these expectations and meetings where they talk about you like you're a product rather than a person can slowly grind you down into a place where you don't know who you are, she says. The industry itself had also begun to shift and react against its old methods. Where, she says, there was a formula before, and I know that because I had it used on me many times, audiences were now craving authenticity and real characters; flawed, relatable heroes instead of perfectly manicured stars.