In just 24 hours, Drivers License broke Spotify records. It then broke them again. In seven days, it topped the charts in the UK and the US.

She even surprised her record label.

“We’d all be lying if we said we knew what was coming,” Polydor’s president Ben Mortimer admitted.

The Driver’s License wasn’t a one-time thing. He earned three Grammy Awards for his debut album, Sour, which sparked a pop-punk revival.

During her Glastonbury debut, the star protested the overturning of Roe v Wade, which removed the federal right to abortion in the US.

During this time, she returned to film her final episodes on Disney’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series; staged her first tour, playing smaller venues cautiously since she had never performed any of her own material before the Brit Awards in 2021.

When we meet in London in August, the singer, now 20 years old, says, “Looking back, it was a crazy journey.”

It seemed almost instantaneous to me, even though I’d been writing songs and working my whole life.

It took me a few months to realize how irrevocably my life had changed.