Cari Fletcher’s excellently titled EP, You Ruined New York City for Me, peels back the layers of a catastrophic break-up with a surgeon’s precision. The tactile lead single Undrunk – over 80m Spotify streams and counting – prays for some sort of time machine to erase a first meeting, while the echo-laden swirl of About You, produced by Malay (Frank Ocean, Zayn), homes in on the minutiae of a now half-empty home.

It’s an open-hearted collection of bold emo-pop – augmented by the ballad I Believe You, released in support of the Time’s Up and #metoo movements – that feels a million miles away from the 25-year-old’s first break as part of ropey country quartet Lakoda Rayne on the US version of The X Factor. When they were voted out early on, Fletcher went to college in New York, where the EP’s defining relationship started and ended.

Her lyrical honesty, which recalls the emotional fearlessness of Julia Michaels, stems from her desire to mean something to her fans. “I just wanted to highlight real female stories, and what it means to be... a queer woman in 2019,” she told Harper’s Bazaar earlier this year.

Her new single, One Too Many, meanwhile, shows she’s not above some good old-fashioned pettiness (“I hope that band you like breaks up,” goes the chorus), part of her desire to quash any illusion of perfectionism. “I’m a hot mess, in my life as a person,” she says, “so I’m going to be that way as an artist.”

Fletcher plays Glasgow, 26 March, Manchester (29th), London (30th)