When alt-pop chanteuse and TikTok superstar Nessa Barrett was just 17 years old, she experienced a “divine intervention moment,” ran away from her New Jersey family home in the “middle of the night,” and landed in Los Angeles — in the middle of a pandemic. And she never looked back.

“COVID hit and I didn’t know how long we were going to be stuck in lockdown, and I was like, ‘I need to get out, or else I’m going to lose all the dreams that I’m trying to chase. I’m going to do it, and I’m going to make it work.’ I had no plan, but it was or-never moment,” she recalls, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records on the release day of her aptly titled third album, Tough Love.

“I was really impulsive. It was a crazy night, but I just got a one-way plane ticket to L.A. and I left without anyone knowing,” she continues. “It was really scary and a lot of people were upset by it. … I just remember putting my phone off of Airplane Mode and my parents away blowing me up. The cops were after me, trying to find me apparently, because I was a runaway. Yeah, it was crazy.”

Things could have gone very, very wrong for Barrett, but it was easy for her to find friends and resources on the West Coast because of her already huge social media following, so she never returned to Jersey — other than one day to get her high school diploma, before immediately flying back to Los Angeles. Now at age 24, she muses, “I think that how far I’ve come, it’s really shocked everyone.” But she always believed in what she was doing.

“There was not a doubt in my mind,” she asserts. “I was so passionate, and I was just like, ‘This is a life I want to live and I’m not going to stop until I get it.’ I feel like when I had that powerful force in me, there was not really a sense of doubt. I didn’t let myself believe that there was going to be a plan B, ever.”

Barrett may seem like a superhumanly confident baddie when she’s discussing her career goals and her wild runaway story, and Tough Love boasts tracks with titles like “Bad Girls Never Die” and “Too Fast to Live, Too Young To Die,” delivered with the sexy, steely allure of a film noir femme fatale. But there’s still a certain fragility and guardedness to Barrett. She’s a tiny slip of thing, at only 4-foot 9, and while she’s always been open about her mental health issues (including borderline personality disorder, bipolar II disorder, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders), she’s also very soft-spoken, almost timid, giving the sense that she’s holding back.

But Barrett is nothing back on Tough Love, her most startlingly vulnerable work yet. That’s particularly true on track 1, “Candy,” which Barrett says is her “most raw and painful song to this day” — a sadly all-too-relatable confessional about sexual exploitation that has resonated so intensely with her fans, she has often been “in tears” when reading her comments.

“It just makes it so worth it when I see so many people connect with it. It makes me feel seen,” Barrett says with a shy smile. “I was really scared [to release “Candy”], because I’d never really touched on that sort of topic before or been honest about that dark part of me. Seeing so many people feel seen too, it makes me feel like I’m not alone, which is amazing.”

On that gut-punching album-opener, she croons dissociatedly, “Had me on my knees, I did my best work/Gave it up for free, and still I get hurt/If I charged a fee, I might feel better/Silly little me, thinking love was more than sex work.” While Barrett understandably declines to reveal the lover(s) or encounter(s) that inspired “Candy” (“There is a really fine line that I walk on when writing, to make sure that I’m not being too personal or giving up too information — because that’s when it kind of gets a little dangerous,” she explains), she does confess, “I think in my head I struggle with intimacy problems, so that’s kind of what that song is about.”

She elaborates, choosing her words thoughtfully: “It’s that feeling of feeling dirty and used and shame. I feel like when I had to be intimate in those moments, that was kind of a character that I was playing. And so, that’s where ‘Candy’ comes from — from trauma and just I guess how I see myself in the mirror. I’ve always really struggled with being intimate, even with someone that I feel comfortable with, and I guess it is something that I’m really struggling with right now. I feel like in the past year it’s been something that has been really hard for me, and I’ve been working through it. But yeah, it’s tough.”

Tough Love is a loose concept album of sorts about all different types of love — “love that’s hard to find,” but not necessarily only the romantic kind. “I feel like my whole life, all forms of love were really tough and hard for me,” Barrett reflects. “I do feel like my mindset and my thought process and how I approach my relationships and other forms of tough love, that stems from my relationship with my family too. I guess it’s all one big thing.

“There are so many different types of love,” she points out. “I have the songs ‘Glamorous’ and ‘God Gave Me Expensive Taste,’ about the love I have with fame and success in the music industry and Hollywood in general. … But I feel like the most important love is the love I have for myself. And I think that’s something that I’ve been really working towards recently, and something that I’ve really learned while writing this album.”

Barrett is “still learning how to adjust” to life in Los Angeles, and she admits that trying to find true love in the city has been difficult. But she has, overall, thrived in L.A., where she has found a home, chosen family, and “so much inspiration in the air. … I feel like I owe everything in my life to this place.” And finally, her sense of self-image/self-love is catching up with that fierce self-belief that she had at age 17 about her career and music.

“I was really able to separate what I wanted and my passions and my talent and my love for music from myself. I think how I felt about myself and how I was treating myself, it was almost like I was really able to separate that,” she explains. “Only up until recently was I really was able to see myself as a whole, and really take care of myself as a whole. I love this music so much, and I can also love myself, and that has become so special, because it really starts to bleed into everything else that I’m able to do. I think as soon as I really found that self-love within myself, that’s when I started to love my music even more. And I really started to believe even more in this future that I really want.”