She is ready to rock the stage at Camp

[Alemeda, from E1] adolescent turmoil.

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"FROM what I've seen online - because I'm chronically online - people are tired of looking at the same thing," the non-punk artist says.

(MICHAEL ROWE For The Times)

“If my mom didn’t treat me the way she did, I wouldn't have left,” says Alemeda, who's now 25. “And if I'd never left, I would never have gotten signed.”

That signing was a deal with Top Dawg Entertainment, home to the Grammy-winning likes of SZA and Doechii and the label that launched Kendrick Lamar to superstardom. Last week, TDE and Warner Records released “But What the Hell Do I Know,” a killer seven-track EP by Alemeda that shows off a bold new voice in Gen Z pop.

Over the woozy guitars of “Losing Myself,” she sings about disappearing into a toxic relationship — “I'm just a heart for your arrow” — while “Happy With You” contemplates her reflex for self-sabotage. In “Beat a Bitch Up,” Alemeda and Doechii trade ride-or-die assurances in an explosive Warped Tour-style chorus.

“But What the Hell Do I Know” is funny and biting and loaded with hooks. Yet the EP closes with a gut-punch of a ballad, “I'm Over It,” about losing someone to addiction. “Kicked back, laughing in a Camry / Talking ‘bout how we hate our families,” Alemeda sings, her voice trembling with emotion, before she spools forward to more painful memories: “I held your hair, I flushed your drugs / You took the love, I took the hit.”

The song, which in its dramatic precision ranks up there with stuff by Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, is a major emotional achievement for Alemeda, who was “very nonchalant about music in the beginning,” she says at TDE’s headquarters in Studio City. She’s wearing low-rise jeans and a paisley-print top and sips an espresso after the six-hour drive from Phoenix.

“I was just trying to escape my household,” she adds. “But I think I've healed a lot through writing about all the things I went through.”