Lauren Spencer Smith’s Debut Album Feels Like a 'Weight Lifted Off My Chest' (Exclusive)

The TikTok sensation walks PEOPLE through the journey of her debut album, 'Mirror,' getting her groove back and what lyric she thinks will leave fans “shook”

A year and half after finding breakthrough success on TikTok — and channeling that into two hit songs — Lauren Spencer Smith feels like she’s aged at least 10 years.

“I feel like I’m 30,” she tells PEOPLE. “Seriously, the amount of things that have happened in the last year — music-wise and also just [in my] personal life — I’m like, 'I’m 30.'”

For Spencer Smith, 19, it feels like "forever ago" since she released her first two singles “Fingers Crossed” and “Flowers" back in early 2022 — both of which went viral on social media.

Now that her debut album Mirror is out in the world, she's starting to feel like herself again.

“The day I announced it, I already felt a weight lifted off my chest.” she says.

Related: Lauren Spencer Smith Recalls 'Challenges' of Making Debut Album: 'So Many Moving Parts' (Exclusive)

Mirror, which features her first two viral hits, plus her more recent singles — “Fantasy,” “That Part” and the Gayle and Em Beihold-assisted “Best Friend Breakup,” — sees the singer trace her journey from an angsty teen who has never been in love to a TikTok sensation who is ready to marry her boyfriend before she’s even entered her third decade of life.

Though she usually draws inspiration from her love life when it comes to her songwriting, for the album’s title — which she knew needed to be about “reflecting” — she found it in a more unusual place.

“Sometimes in therapy, they'll tell you to stare at yourself in the mirror for five minutes every day, and that's when you really view your true self,” she says. “So I was like, 'Oh, I think we need to call the album Mirror.'”

Related: Lauren Spencer-Smith Drops 'Flowers': 'One of My Favorite Songs I've Ever Written'

The record, like everything Spencer Smith releases, is a deep-dive into life, her love and heartache.

In an unexpected turn of events, one she says she certainly never saw coming when she began writing the album in 2021, it ends with her hopelessly in love — rather than just hopeless.

“The most surprising thing is that the album ends happy,” she says. “And that I wrote a love song.”

After gaining acclaim for her gut-wrenching ballads — “Fingers Crossed” is a story of a partner making empty promises, while “Flowers” sees her realize how toxic a past relationship was — writing songs where she’s in love feels strange.

“I feel more vulnerable writing a love song than a sad song,” Spencer Smith admits. “It’s a little off-brand.”

The former American Idol contestant dropped her final single in the lead-up to Mirror’s release in May with "That Part." In the song, the Vancouver Island native admits she’s ready to settle down and marry her boyfriend. And while she admits she was “scared” to share with the world, the song also made her feel like she was getting her groove back.

“I feel like there was a long period of time where I was like, ‘I think I’m a failure and I’m going to be unsuccessful for the rest of my life,'" she admits. "Like, nothing is working. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

That period of uncertainty — where clips of her unreleased music weren’t getting 15 million views like a TikTok teaser for “That Part” did in early May — was discouraging, and she found herself questioning what her album rollout would look like.

“I’m like, 'Am I gonna have any traction before this album comes out?'” she recalls thinking. “I was very stressed.”

But Spencer Smith credits much of the success of “That Part” to Jakke Erixson, the same producer who collaborated with her on her first ever hit, “Fingers Crossed."

“I think it's cool that it's full circle,” she says of reuniting with Erixson.

Though Mirror ends with Spencer Smith happy and in love, it doesn’t start off that way.

“The story starts with realizing you're with someone that maybe doesn't love you like you thought they did,” she says of the album’s opening track, “Never Been in Love."

She continues, “It really sets the tone of the album, like, ‘Wow, I'm not in love. I've never been in love. I want to be in love. This is so sad.’ And then you kind of go through the breakup, the angry [phase] and by the middle of the album, you get to the, ‘Oh, I realized they were a narcissist, I’m kind of healing from this.’”

By the end, though, her life has taken a complete turn. She traces the project's journey as being “scared to fall in love, but by the end of the album, I’m in love and I’m happy.”

The final track, “Do It All Again,” is a “representation of everything happens for a reason.”

In the song, Spencer Smith candidly admits that she would put herself through all of the ups-and-downs she’s endured through the record's 15 tracks again — and the nearly three years since she began writing for it — just to be able to reach the point in life she’s at now.

“I’m where I want to be. I would relive every single emotion in this album to be where I am today,” she says, adding, “You leave the album being like, 'wow, that was a rollercoaster,' but everything in life happens for a reason.”

She ends the song — and the album — with a full-circle moment as she croons “I’m glad you had your fingers crossed,” in the song’s piano-led outro, referencing the empty promises of love she initially sang about in her debut single.

“We’ve never come up with something smarter, lyrically, as songwriters, than what we did in the outro,” she says. “I think people are gonna be shook by that.”

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As someone whose songwriting career began almost in tandem with their success, Spencer Smith admits she felt for a long time that the songs she wrote were “very simple.”

So she knew that she had to end the album with a bang — and that came both in the form of a creative play-on-words outro and a surprise feature from one of her all-time favorite artists.

“The person who plays the piano at the end is actually JP Saxe,” she reveals. “It’s really cool that I get to be like, ‘JP Saxe played piano on my album.’”

She’s hopeful that “Do It All Again” was just the beginning of a partnership with the “If the World Was Ending” singer.

“I’m pretty confident we’ll probably write songs together for my second album, and this was just the intro.”

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As she looks back at the three-year journey that led her to Mirror, Spencer Smith is focused on securing a place for herself in the music industry — and moving past any title that keeps her bound solely to TikTok success.

For now, though, she’s just happy.

“I don’t really care if people know me as the TikTok girl or the girl from American Idol. At some point, people are just gonna know me – Lauren Spencer Smith.”

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