For most of her 24 years, singer-songwriter Lexi Jayde has felt like she’s had to chase after love. With her debut album, LOVER GIRL, she’s realising that love’s been running after her all along.

The greatest love story that Los Angeles-born Lexi Jayde has ever known is that of her parents. “They are really, really in love,” she says, eyes sparkling. “They did such a good job of making me feel like a love like theirs is actually out there because that’s all I’ve had to watch growing up. I had such a good reference of what love looked like.” From childhood to teenagehood and now her early 20s, she’s spent life chasing a love like theirs. But reality bursts the bubble that fantasy leaves room for, and that was the case for Jayde. “When I got into the real world, I was like, ‘Where’s my Prince Charming? When is he coming to pick me up?’ And then I got stabbed in the heart and got my heart broken.” And what do you do when life gives you heartbreak? Well, you make an album.

Two EPs deep and her debut album LOVER GIRL, out today (Friday 21st August) via Columbia Records, she delicately traces the tangled web of one’s early 20s, returning to one common denominator across all 14 tracks: love that surpasses mere romance. It’s Lexi Jayde meets Carrie Bradshaw, with a touch of The Notebook and a dash of The 10 Things I Hate About You. Between frolicking in Central Park fountains in ruffled chiffon dresses, looking up, simultaneously hopeless and hopeful, at the sky, and bus rides wearing ‘you’re just a waste of good mascara’ stamped tops, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter captures the whimsy and wrangling that heartache often catalyses in all areas of life.

It’s a big week for Miss Jayde. When we speak, she’s set to spend the evening with her friends at a fan event in anticipation of the album, while also being two days out from her 24th birthday. Her joy is hard to miss. It’s so plainly written across a frequent wide smile that reaches her squinted eyes. “I’m actually having a girls dinner on Wednesday night for my birthday, and the theme is Disney Princesses – of course, I’m turning 24, and I want a princess party,” she laughs, mostly at herself.

Beyond playing mid-week Princess dress-up, Jayde takes on the role of a people’s princess of sorts. Wherever she goes, she’s covered in love, if not exuding it – and that’s wholeheartedly intentional. “I feel like I surround myself with a lot of lover girls,” she says. “My girlfriends, all my best friends, are lover girls.” Naturally, with matters pertaining to lover girls, Taylor Swift, who Jayde deems “the biggest lover girl”, gets swept into the conversation, and “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus gets mentioned as her “favourite song of all time” – “It got me through the toughest times in my life, still to this day.”

So, when she’s walking through New York’s Perry Street, where Miss Bradshaw resided in the city’s West Village, she leaves a trail of smiles and compliments. So, it was second nature that her debut album would be a total labour of love. “I’ve learned over the past few years that it’s not a weakness. It’s actually such a gift to wear your heart on your sleeve and love so hard and want to feel things deeply and over-romanticise life, especially in a time where the world kind of feels really daunting,” she exhales.

That doom-and-gloom feeling becomes an undercurrent through which LOVER GIRL simmers. “It isn’t just about romance – it’s so much more,” she insists. “It’s choosing to love over and over and over again after being hurt. It’s choosing to see the beauty and the pain. It’s dancing in the rain and doing all the cliché Rom-Com-my things – living like your life is a movie.” But every movie has a great plot, and Jayde’s had to kick into action for her to unlock the epiphanies on this record.

“When I wrote this [album], I was a girl who was lost and trying to find herself,” she shares. “I was putting everybody else’s needs before my own, and going through a lot mentally. I hit a lot of bumps in the road, and I had to grow some balls and confidence to really put myself first.” Ultimately, the solution seemed glaringly obvious: “I didn’t want to be my biggest enemy anymore.”

This all comes to a sombre settle on the album’s seventh track, “bubblebath”. A frustration-pinched song that spills straight from Jayde’s diary pages to a Lana Del Rey-esque melody, it begins and ends with “I’m in my head again, I’m coming down / I’ll take a bubble bath, drown it all out”. It becomes the undoubted “heartbeat” of LOVER GIRL.

After “a tough four years” dealing with anxiety and panic attacks for the first time, her nervous system went haywire. The bathtub became the place where she found daily solitude. “I remember this one night I was in my bath staring at the ceiling, thinking ‘My world is falling apart, this feels like the end, this is the lowest it’s gonna get.’ And I just kept asking myself, ‘Am I going to feel like this forever?’ ‘Is it ever going to get better than this?’” The line, “Losing my lover girl, where is she gone? / I used to feel everything, and now I’m just numb”, becomes the point where revelation clicks into place: “I lost my lover girl.”

That mid-album processing gave her room to reckon with exactly who she was, and feel it fully without shame. From “delusional” to “i want him bad” and “when does it end?”, all of that explicit – or suggested – cheek is underpinned by an ache that can only be justified by love. “The beauty is that I came back stronger,” she proclaims. “This song is so special to me, and talks about something very vulnerable, things that are really hard to talk about.”

Now that it’s releasing this week, Jayde can only describe it as having been “such a trip”. It’s been daunting, it’s been scary, but her debut album “ended up being perfect”. “I couldn’t sleep last night, I couldn’t sleep five nights ago,” she laughs. “This has been something that has been slowly brewing in my body, and now, this is happening.”

And it’s not just the album that’s happening: “Tour is next,” Jayde gleams, offering her fans some reassurance. “I haven’t announced it yet, but I’m very excited to start getting on the road again.” But let not the message of her debut record go amiss. “If you are striving to have that happy ending, fairytale kind of love, it is out there. We can’t let these stupid boys make us feel like it’s not,” she says, clapping her hands together. “We’re bringing back yearning. That’s why I’m releasing LOVER GIRL – bring back lovers!”

“So many times in my life, my shoe has fallen off, and I’ve asked, ‘Where’s my Prince?’” But as the saying goes, sometimes, you have to kiss a few frogs to find your Prince Charming. And though she’s ribbited through a few flukes, she’s finally landed.

“I’m very in love right now. I’m in something good for the first time,” she says through closed, wishful eyes. “It’s really weird…And interesting. My whole life I’ve always wanted this and now I have it and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s no fighting, there’s no questioning.’ It’s learning to just accept it.” That sounds like the perfect happy ending to me Lexi.

Lexi Jayde’s debut album LOVER GIRL is out now on all streaming platforms.

Words – Aswan Magumbe