Despite having a Hot 100 hit and a songwriting credit for pop icon Britney Spears to her name, Phoebe Ryan still has moments of self-doubt. Although she’s achieved these major accomplishments at only 26 years old, the singer-songwriter is really just starting out. Her career is a perfect example of the way pop works now; she’s using the same recipe of stinging honesty and slick hooks on massive features (The Chainsmokers “All We Know”) that’s turned artists like Tove Lo, Dua Lipa, and Halsey into household names. Now, she’s ready for her turn in the spotlight.

Bubbling under the surface of singles like “Dead” or “Homie,” off her 2015 EP Mine, are deep feelings of uncertainty about the future of her career. The Texas native wonders aloud if she deserves the good moments—like signing with Columbia Records, finding chart success with The Chainsmokers, opening for Charlie Puth on his sold out tour, or hitting the road with Tove Lo—while constantly anticipating things going to shit.

“I think it’s fair to say everyone has their moments of self-doubt,” the 26-year-old Texan, who was raised in New Jersey and now resides in Los Angeles, tells Genius. We’re in the green room of Hammerstein Ballroom before her opening performance on a final stop of Tove Lo’s tour when Ryan takes a moment. “My moments might be a little bit more inflated because I’m just a little bit more dramatic or over the top about things sometimes. Self-doubt is super real. I’m always doubting myself—when am I not?”

Ryan admits to letting those feelings of doubt nag at her as her eyes glazed over her computer screen on the tour bus at four in the morning just a week earlier on the road with Tove Lo, “I was having a moment where I was just like, ‘Fuck this. I can’t do this anymore,”’ she says.

Many will recognize Ryan’s voice from her feature on The Chainsmokers’ 2016 hit single “All We Know.” She met the duo a few years ago while living in New York City and hopped on the track that she says felt “warm and cozy and sad and hopeful and all the things you experience when you love someone.” Over 271 million Spotify streams and a peak Billboard position at No. 18 later, the move remains a triumph for Ryan, who had already been working on music for over a decade.

At 15 years old, Ryan spent most days recording covers in her bedroom before gaining the confidence to write her own songs. Throughout high school, she performed at open mic nights at a local Red Bank, NJ coffee shop. Feeling like an outsider had a strong hand in shaping her early life and perhaps that’s why Ryan’s brand of pop feels laced with feelings of longing. After high school, Ryan was accepted to New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music where she studied engineering and production. It was only a few years later that she went viral with a mashup of R. Kelly and Miguel titled “Ignition/Would You…” It wasn’t long after the video, which has close to two million views on YouTube, that she signed Columbia Records and released her debut EP, Mine.

After signing, she headed out to an ASCAP songwriting camp in the South of France at the Château Marouatte. Along with 25 other songwriters, Ryan was determined to make the last day at camp count, which is when producer Jason Evigan started cooking up a track. “It was me and four other writers in the room and we just started talking about this dream world where a girl is crying and looking at the moon,“ she says. "We all painted this story together.” A few months later, Britney Spears' team got its hands on a demo version and wanted it for her ninth album, Glory. The result is a pining love song titled “Man on the Moon,” about a lost love brought to life by Spears’ breathy vocals. “The song is basically like that girl from the [Spears’ 2000] ‘Lucky’ video later in life,” Ryan says.

Hearing Spears record words she wrote was a “mind blowing” moment for Ryan, but the songwriter is primed to make a name for herself with a debut album on the way. Fans got their first taste of that long-awaited solo project with her latest soul-searing pop drop, “Dark Side,” where Ryan sings about chasing a dark love but being too deep in it to even care. “Even at your worst, I love you hard / If you wanna keep me, go too far,” she sings. “The more this person is pushing you away or pushing their shittiness on you, the more you’re like, ‘Let’s fucking go. Let’s make this trip together. Bring me down with you,‘“ she says.

The inspiration for the song didn’t come from any one person, but from a collection of her own experiences. “One of my friends told me that my biggest strength is also my biggest weakness, which is that I see the good in everyone to the point where it becomes such a fucking problem,” she explains. “I always want to defend everybody all the time. I don’t think I chase that dark side. I think I’m just blinded by my habit of always looking for the good that I disregard the bad.”

Like most of Ryan’s songs, “Dark Side” explores people’s shortcomings, including her own. “Flaws make people perfect, but also they’re fucking flaws—and some flaws are more destructive than others,” she says. That personal destruction makes for some pretty powerful songs subjects on her next album, which she’s already hard at work on in the studio. She’s linked up with producers like Big Taste (Justin Bieber, “Company”) and Stargate (Beyoncé, “Irreplaceable” and Rihanna, “Diamonds”). There’s no set release date yet, but she promises it’ll be an organic extension of her fizzed out brand of electro-pop rocked by universal feelings of uncertainty and growing up.

Ryan feels fated for that same scale of success in 2017 as each new song brings all of her sides into a more fine-tuned focus. “The problem with me is that I change so much,“ she says. "Last week, I was the saddest person in the world.” But this week, she’s on a visible high, inebriated with the thought that her next single in the final phase of the approval process might be a track she’s performing tonight. “Some sad ass songs, some happy ass songs…I want the record to reflect all of that.”