Although she is on course for pop stardom, with two nominations at next week’s Brit awards, 22-year-old Skye Newman lives in a cabin at the bottom of her sister’s garden in London. It’s the backdrop for the music video to her song Hairdresser, which has 7.5m views on YouTube. In the clip, she is made up, her hair in rollers, lounging with a gaggle of friends. Licking her fingertips to roll a joint, she laments a one-sided friendship with another woman: “When I’m needed, know I’ll be there first / You don’t reciprocate and, girl, that hurts.”

It’s typical of Newman’s songcraft: ballad-driven contemporary soul that goes beyond romantic heartbreak to cover all kinds of pain and recrimination.

The cabin gives Newman independence, but also proximity to family in the main house – which is where she is sitting today, barefaced, barefoot and drowning in an oversized black tracksuit. Her sister, who is also Newman’s manager, pops my tea on to the table and hovers nearby. The sisters each have their blond hair slicked back into topknots. Today is a busy day and tomorrow they fly to the US where Newman has two sold-out shows.

Newman’s family is the subject of her biggest song to date, Family Matters, which is nominated for song of the year at the Brits (she is also up for breakthrough artist). It lays bare the pain that she experienced growing up: phone calls from the police, drug abuse in her home, a brush with death. “At school, weed was my perfume,” she sings. “Then my brother’s drugs got harder / It became substance abuse, so he’s a stupid bastard.”

Understandably, she guards the details of her family history closely, but the accumulation of stresses that she and her siblings were living with contributed to her having two life-threatening seizures, being admitted to hospital and having tests for a tumour or bleed on the brain. As for the situation she sings about in Family Matters, she says: “We all just tried to love him, because that’s all you can do. It’s weird to grieve for someone who is still alive.” In the comments for the song on YouTube, fans earnestly offer support to Newman and compare her to Amy Winehouse and Adele.

Newman shares some qualities with those two generational talents: a voice that could move a rock, energy that fizzes as she speaks and that magical ability to distil a sentiment in a way that feels completely personal to an audience of millions. One key difference is that she was twice rejected from the Brit school, the performing arts institution from which both Adele and Winehouse graduated.

Instead, as a teenager she started posting performance videos on social media, which blew up during the Covid lockdown. She was initially hesitant to reply to the calls that soon followed from A&Rs and record labels. “I come from a vulnerable background and there are vultures in this world,” she says. “People jump on that.”

The council estates she grew up on taught her a lot more besides, and she attributes her storytelling to the range of people she saw as she moved around south-east London living with various family members: “Life can be hard but I love the way I grew up because I got to experience and understand people,” she says. “It made me very empathetic.”

She is passionate about putting a spotlight on people who grew up in similar environments. “There could be so much more love and education put into people who have less because there is so much knowledge in those places; there’s so much talent but they don’t get the same opportunities.”

Another artist who shares these sentiments is Ed Sheeran, who recently made a plea to the government to invest more in music in the school curriculum. He asked Newman to do a support set at his Ipswich homecoming in 2025, where they also performed together. “He’s the sweetest man. He’s just so normal, same as Lewis,” as in Capaldi, who she supported on tour last year. “I’m drawn to them people, because that’s how I am. I’m not above nobody, nobody’s above me.”

Ahead of our interview, her team shared some unreleased music including Woman I Am, a flawless piano ballad about the female relationships that have held her through difficult times. Here, Newman’s voice sounds softer and more controlled than it is on her breakthrough songs.

I ask about the times when she needed that support. “My whole life,” she says with another laugh. “My whole life, I feel like there’s been …” Then her voice wobbles and there are tears. Her sister shuffles over in her slippers and wraps her arms around Skye.

“I hate saying it because I feel like it sounds like ‘poor me’,” Newman says, still crying. “I’m good; I’m a very fucking strong person, I’ve got lots of strong women around me. But it’s never-ending. That’s the circumstances that I’m in, with family and things.”

Again, she holds back from outlining those exact circumstances. She gathers herself: “I’m grateful, because it means I can write so much music that helps so many other people.” A lot of them have told her as much. “It breaks my heart every time I have to hear that, especially from kids,” she continues. “But there’s no better feeling than knowing that something I’ve gone through has done something for them. I feel powerful. It makes me feel great to know that they’re not alone. That I’m not alone.”

She also writes vividly about the toxicity that can tear relationships apart. On Out Out, she pleads with a closed-off partner: “Is it really that hard to just love me loudly?” It’s the sort of relatable sentiment that speaks to women of her age, and older. “Not having solid role models to look up to in the space of men, it’s quite hard to then pick the right person,” she says. “I feel like I attract hurt and I attract brokenness. I also fight for things that I shouldn’t.”

On her recent single Lonely Girl, Newman speaks to teenage girls like an older sister: “Please don’t let him take control / He’s far too old / To be the one that takes you home.” The song was inspired by a friend of hers who, aged 15, was involved with a 21-year-old. Newman says many friends have experienced such predatory behaviour, and she herself was chased and intimidated by men when she was as young as 12.

“I got more attention from men, builders, from the age of 12 to 16, and then it just got less and less as I got older,” she says. Then she asks: “As a grown woman, do you really get catcalled in the street as much as you did as a child?” The question takes me by surprise, but the answer is no. “A lot of it is about control,” Newman concludes. “There’s men that do it that are paedophiles, and then there’s the men that do it because they’re like: well, you can’t do anything about it.”

A fire gets going inside her. “Most men think that a woman is frail, weak and dependent. No, we’re not. A feminine woman is independent.” She moves from having her feet tucked under her to stretching out and gesticulating. “It winds me up. We need to go back to women ruling the world.”

During Woman I Am, she sings “our cycles are in sync, it’s bigger than you think”. “We’ve been knocked off of our fucking cycles [by men]. We’re meant to be in sync with the Earth and nature: it’s Mother Nature for a reason,” she says, carrying on riffing, pointing out that there are species that procreate without male input. “I honestly do believe women used to be like that. We got fucking bored and we created the man. Because what are you? You are half of what we are. You’re just our chromosomes with a leg knocked off.”

She says she believes in another power above her, though not a male God figure. “I don’t believe that this” – our world – “is everything. If anything, I think this is hell. We’re in hell, mate, and we need to work our way to find inner peace. On the other side of that is heaven.”

It’s enjoyable watching her go off like this, with a power she has evidently snatched back for herself and channelled into her songs. That process has probably saved her life, she thinks. After experiencing those near-death seizures, brought on by emotional distress, she then “flipped my thinking” and stopped bottling things up. She started writing. “It’s how I let everything out healthily. I don’t know what I would do without it.” One of the songs she wrote then, not yet released, is a real tearjerker as she sings: “I’m going to be selfish with my life, because it’s mine.”

“I felt like that song was God, the universe, my auntie, whoever, showing me that if you think about yourself, and you put good back into yourself, then your body will naturally give back to you,” she says. “That’s just what happened.” She was signed to a major label and in January she topped the BBC’s Sound of … poll, the breakthrough artist contest won in recent years by Chappell Roan and PinkPantheress. “Hairdresser went off, Family Matters went off, everything just went. People say: how do you do it? And I’m like: your thoughts are so fucking powerful!”

As her star power also increases, she says she is mindful of “not falling into the whirlwind of this”. With so much turbulence in her life before this new chapter, she is happy to be close to her sister with her own space to breathe – “I enjoy sitting in my cabin with my friends, smoking weed, watching films and that’s it” – and she’s finding that in an industry that can be slippery and attract people with ulterior motives, she wants to protect herself. “I feel like a lot of this world is just kind of an exchange, and not in a good way. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours – and I’ll do it when needs be. But I just don’t feel the need to put myself in all of it. I’m quite happy with the people I’ve got in my life. I’m quite happy with my life the way it is. Quite happy with my cabin.”

• Skye Newman’s UK tour begins 11 April at Mountford Hall, Liverpool. The Brit awards are on 28 February, screening on ITV. Part one of her SE1 project is out now, with a second part coming soon