None of this is to say that this is not an eminently individual record. All of this picking and choosing creates a landscape that allows Joyce to explain exactly what it is she's feeling exactly how she wants to say it – there are very few artists who could take chronically online sayings like 'you're cooked' and 'bro said that he knew a spot' and make it sound like a mind-blowing original thought.

Really, though, this hits at the crux of the album. Joyce is aware that her audience is, for the most part, people her own age – excluding Elton John, obviously. As a result, 'MINI SKIRT WARRIOR' uses a vernacular that grew out of social media trends and uses it to portray the very real, head-spinning emotional reactions to being a young woman in the modern world.

"The main basis of this album is first times; first times for everything, really. Something I say a lot is 'this is our first time living', and my audience is very much my age group, so we're all doing things for the first time and feeling them to the extreme."

She continues: "Everything is fast, everything is fresh, and a lot of the songs are about the first time you feel like you're falling in love, the first time you like yourself, the first time you hate yourself, the first time you might like a girl. It's about navigating that coming-of-age teenhood into womanhood and adulthood and just figuring out how to get there."

Joyce admits that this album is the first time, really, that she has felt brave enough to delve into introspection, with much of her debut EP, Ache in my tooth, and following singles being more of a tongue-in-cheek break into who she is and wants to be as an artist. Much of that humour is still peppered across the record, with opener 'Legends' operating as an egregious, over-the-top origin story for flowerovlove.

"I don't usually write vulnerable songs; this is the first time I'm actually releasing something very vulnerable, something that's so honest and true, but it was fun. Once we did it, I was like, 'this was so needed for my soul', and people are really going to resonate with it, which is going to be lovely."

The most soul-baring moment for Joyce is closer 'Girls Will Be Girls' featuring WILLOW, a track which sums up the album's mission statement: illuminating and raising up her inner child in order to properly grow into the woman she wants to be.

"That track's just, like, girlhood, for real," she says. "For that song, we went to the park, and I just knew I had something special there. I didn't want to write a song about stereotypical love, about you and a person instead of you and yourself. The song touches on most of the women in my life.

"The lyrics in the bridge – 'my eyes, my light, my thighs, my pride, my alibi, my mind' – it's like, I've got to thank my mum for my life. And I kind of miss her because I miss how my mum felt when I was younger; those feelings change when you grow up because you see her differently as you become a woman. She has made me who I am now and has allowed me the stage and the space to do this. She's inspired me to take risks."

Risk is a recurring theme across 'MINI SKIRT WARRIOR', whether in the form of a potentially devastating hook-up in 'In My Victoria's Secret', falling into unrequited love in 'American Wedding', or realising that the feelings you have for someone unexpected are stronger than you realised in 'Debonair'.

It is the latter of those three tracks which, arguably, sees the flowerovlove façade slip to reveal Joyce at her most unsteady, her head swirling as she tries to come to terms with a challenge to her sexuality that she hadn't expected. Not only did this experience challenge her emotionally, but it also pushed her to try new things musically, playing with structure to let the story breathe.

"I was just having very new feelings about someone I had just met, and not being sure if I liked her because I'd never had those feelings for a girl before."

She adds: "Writing a song like this was hard, I'll be honest, because it's very vulnerable. And it's also, like, how do I structure a song like this with very new complex feelings? It's about putting more complexity into the lyrics. Even the word debonair – it means suave and like, very swag – so to use that word was a juxtaposition where I'm trying to be so cool but have such conflicting emotions."

Many people make the mistake of thinking that pop music, with it often being the most accessible and seemingly superficial at points, is the simplest form of music to make. In reality, though, the ability to create something catchy that gets stuck in someone's head and makes them want to dance without quite knowing why is something that bands and artists have struggled with since the 60s. flowerovlove is proof that, to create a record with more hooks than a fishing gear shop, you need to really study what makes a song go from toe-tapper to permanent earworm.

"My process of making this album at first was very subconscious, I only realised it was going to be a thing when I was about three songs in and thought, 'Ok, these are all bangers, this is going to work'.

"I let go of any pressure and just studied all of my favourite songwriters. It's a very nerdy process, but I studied the structure of the writing and the structure of pop songwriting, what I really love about it and thinking, 'Why do I love this so much and how does it make my brain feel?' I became, like, a fresh out of the packet sponge and was just absorbing what I could so I could go back and make it effortless."

That process took her to bands like Blondie and Fleetwood Mac, but Joyce found most of her inspiration closer to home, getting the chance to create with songwriter-to-the-stars Amy Allen. That star quality you hear sprinkled over this record? Yeah, that's her.

"The way she writes songs makes everything sound like every single song I loved when I was younger," Joyce explains, "she's the one person I specifically wanted to work with."

Amy made up a writing and production team predominantly made up of women, barring the addition of Joyce's brother, Wilfred; she is keen to underline the importance of yet more super-producers Pom Pom and Skyler Stonestreet in creating 'MINI SKIRT WARRIOR'. Given the album is so heavily centred on exploring and explaining, as well as she can, a woman's world, this was something vital for Joyce to be able to tell her story unfailingly.

"It's different from writing with a man because they wouldn't understand it. Most of the credits on this album are women because writing with women brings out your inner girl and feels like touching glitter and jumping on trampolines. You have to do the things you love to do, and I think we forget to choose to be happy sometimes; we forget to choose the things that are fun."

Diving headfirst into this way of working opened her up to previously unexplored depths, using her love of language to illuminate her determination to be totally honest about how she's feeling and where she wants to go. To sum this up, she points to a lyrical Easter Egg that underscores both her knack for writing killer tracks and for unravelling trauma.

"On ['Legends'], my favourite line is probably the opening lyric: 'Legend has it, she never left the club; the club was built around flowerovlove'. First of all, that song I made when I was 15 with my brother. We were just like messing around, I wasn't even really flowerovlove yet; it was kind of manifesting the place I'm in now and this whole project."

She continues: "But I was always very obsessed with cyclical structure, so one of the last lyrics [in closer 'Girls Will Be Girls] is 'crying in the club because of somebody you love' because it rhymes with 'the club was built around flowerovlove', right? It was subconscious, too, so when I listened back, I couldn't believe the invisible string attaching things.

"Also, the concept of crying in the club is about that feeling of when you're in a room, and there's loud music and so many people around you, but you feel so alone. It's something musicians and artists very much feel; you're surrounded by so many people, but you don't even know if you like them. Like, I'm with this person, I don't even know if I like them, or I'm at this party and I feel stupid."

Although she's now permanently based in Los Angeles – and loving being able to "bump into Justin Bieber in a coffee shop" – she is to return to home to the UK to support multi-time Dork cover star Niall Horan on his arena tour, an opportunity for her not only to show off her knowledge of One Direction's X Factor lore (which happened when she was, crushingly, only five-years-old), but also to play this new album in exactly the size of room they deserve.

"I'm so excited because this show is going to be completely new; the whole setup is completely different and completely directed by myself. So, I'm excited to put it together, and I'm excited for my vision to come to life. I'm also just excited to have so much fun. Like, making this album is when I realised that I forgot to have fun since I got into this career. So now I'm just going to have fun again."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sheen of immeasurable confidence that covers 'MINI SKIRT WARRIOR', Joyce is already plotting for the future of flowerovlove, shrewdly giving a vague answer about what might be coming next. Hint: 'Kiss Kiss Kiss' acts as a gateway between worlds.

"Sonically, it's going to be more expressive. It's more rugged. It's more like, 'oh, this is a weird sound, but it's not necessarily experimental."

For now, flowerovlove fans everywhere will be content to dance around their bedrooms, make TikTok choreos, and just generally relish in the world of this debut album. Full of bravado and plastered in sadness-hiding smiles, it is the first step on a path for which Joyce has already plotted an end, one which she is less opaque about when asked.

"Simple: world domination."

Taken from the September 2026 issue of Dork. flowerovlove's album 'MINI SKIRT WARRIOR' is out 28th August.