By L’s own admission, Lynks began life as a comedy act. “I mean, I had a song called ‘How to Make a Béchamel Sauce in 10 Steps (With Pictures)’. I wasn’t taking it too seriously.” It’s all the more remarkable, then, that he’s gone on to become one of queer pop’s most potent forces. Instantly recognisable thanks to his self-made costumes – that he’s described as making him a ‘masked drag monster’, while NME went for ‘alt-pop gimp’ – his taste for thumping beats, stylised dance numbers and lurid strobe lighting have made the Lynks live experience an unforgettable one, and marked him out as one of the scene’s most unfailingly entertaining performers.

By the time he released his second EP, Smash Hits Vol. 2, though, Lynks realised he had more to offer. ‘Str8 Acting’ quickly became his biggest hit – “the one song I would play to people if they wanted to know what Lynks was about” – and beneath its skittering beat and wonky electronics is a searingly witty takedown of the fetishisation of heterosexuality in the gay community, delivered in a brilliantly deadpan manner. “That was the first time I’d tried to write a song that was in any way personal,” he recalls. “Why do we have this obsession with being straight acting? And I found, when I started playing it live, that it was really satisfying and cathartic. I was like, “fuck yeah! This is something I believe in!”

It was a revelatory moment. “When I started out, it wasn’t that my songs were tongue-in-cheek – I mean, my tongue was through my cheek. But I started to realise that being comedic weirdly allows you to bare a bit more of your soul than with traditional lyrics, because they can become a bit flowery and cliche really easily. Being tongue-in-cheek lets you be pretty truthful and comment on bigger issues. You can use it to dig deeper.”

That was the mindset as he put together this third EP, MEN. It remains quintessentially Lynks, with all three tracks remaining gloriously in-your-face electro-pop bangers, but as the title suggests, he’s using them as vehicles to explore his relationship with masculinity. Lead single ‘Silly Boy’ continues in the same riotously excoriating vein as ‘Str8 Acting’, and was inspired in part by his experiences on tour supporting Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes. “That made me realise how important it is to embrace a punk ethos in a live show. There’s a lot of power in queer anger, and I rarely see that explored much. Gay men’s anger is characterised as being funny somehow – like sassy or bitchy. But there’s something about queer rage that I love.”

And yet, at the centre of Lynks is an exploration of queer vulnerability, something that’s become increasingly important to him as the project has morphed from the cabaret act it began as to the queercore behemoth it is today. “It’s great that we’re at a point in time where we have queer people onstage who are incredibly proud, telling the world that we’re fabulous and we’re slaying, but I want to speak more to the fact that the world messes us up quite a bit, and we have problems too, because it’s very difficult growing up queer. I think we can find power by embracing that vulnerability, and I’m enjoying flying the flag for that.”