Lizzo admitted she felt stressed and genuinely sad after her latest album, Bitch, failed to chart.
The 38-year-old pop singer released her fifth studio project on June 5, yet Bitch did not make the US Billboard 200, nor did it crack the UK Albums Top 100, leaving Lizzo candid about how painful the outcome felt after her prior runs of chart-topping success.
During a discussion on the Swiftologist podcast, Lizzo elaborated: “At the moment of releasing the album, I internalized it completely. I carried it with me in a heavy way… I hurt my own feelings and spent several days feeling anxious and down, because I kept thinking: ‘Hold up, this is some of my best material.’
“I had to acknowledge that the music industry has shifted over the last three years—and we need to talk about that, including the radio side for which I once took a lot of heat, but it’s indeed happening and it’s real.”
“But also the way I relate to the world musically and my connection with listeners has changed. I think I needed to grieve that transformation…”
Lizzo’s preceding album, Special, peaked at number two on the Billboard 200 in 2022, while her 2019 project, Cuz I Love You, previously climbed to number six.
She added: “I didn’t expect it to be insane, but I didn’t think it would be this bad either… There was a 24-hour stretch where I tied my worth to a single number, and that felt soul-crushing.”
The singer later revealed she received support from fellow artist SZA—Solana Imani Rowe—after Bitch arrived. She said: “Thank God for Solana; she called me and said she’d been thinking about me.”
“I asked myself if I was a failure, and she reassured me, saying, ‘Oh my God, no!’—she’s incredibly kind.”
She described meditating and praying on the situation, concluding that she should not measure her worth by success or by numbers, because doing so can be soul-crushing if you let it.
