Five years ago, Ari Staprans Leff was a junior at New York University, studying music technology. Now he's known as Lauv, the stage moniker under which he’s since toured and released a stream of singles and EPs. If he’d been asked where he saw himself in five years, it probably wouldn’t be here.

In the literal sense, "here" is El Centro, a homestyle Mexican restaurant west of Midtown Manhattan where the 25-year-old worked his first "real job" as a sophomore in college. Over a champion’s lunch of frozen margaritas, chips, and guac, he recalls the origins of his musical career. Within his first year working at the restaurant, amid school and unpaid internships at recording studios, he wrote and released his first single, "The Other," which made a splash on Spotify. But it was his second release, "I Like Me Better," that became a viral hit. Collaborations with K-Pop sensation BTS, British singer-songwriter Anne-Marie, and Australia’s synth pop darling Troye Sivan followed, bringing him to the figurative "here": the edge of pop-stardom.

After graduating in 2016, Leff had planned to move to Los Angeles to be a songwriter and producer. "I didn't know it at the time, but Lauv was the outlet for me to be actually be myself while I was trying to write songs that I thought other people would want to sing," he says. The breakout success of "I Like Me Better" gave Leff the confidence to pursue his own music full time, but not before racking up songwriting credits for hits like Charli XCX's "Boys," Khalid's "Hundred," Celine Dion's "Imperfections," and the Backstreet Boys's "Nobody Else." "I wanted to do the artist thing, but I also didn't really have any confidence to focus on it,” he says. “Over time, that shifted.”

His first album, How I’m Feeling, is out today, but Leff says that he was meant to have been working on it well over a year earlier. "I got to the point towards the beginning of 2019, where I just hit rock-bottom, mentally," he says. He even considered quitting music entirely: "I hit my lowest point of depression and was diagnosed with OCD. I was having a lot of obsessive negative thoughts that I just couldn't get rid of; I was in such a bad place.”

What has fatigued him is the brand that has developed around him: Pop’s favorite sad boy, the "heartbreak king." It makes sense, how it happened; Leff’s often-melancholy lyrical phrases are punctuated by a devastating falsetto and the kinds of irresistibly catchy beats that usually underscore nights at the club. The life he’s chosen has two sides. His love of music—writing, singing, producing, performing—has been a constant, but he has less affection for the degree of self-promotion that underlies much of musical success today. "It's great, the idea of spreading a message, and spreading music and connecting with people, but then it becomes about more than that. It becomes about [being] a face. It becomes this kind of weird thing where it fuels your ego and sometimes it makes you feel amazing, but then sometimes you feel like shit," he admits.