Breakthrough singer Elle King had a huge hit with “Ex’s and Oh’s” in 2015, but the feel-good, carefree 27-year-old has remembered a time not long before that, when she worked the small-club circuit without much money — or even a cellphone.

“I played in a lot of empty bars, and I slept on a lot of couches … and I didn’t have a cellphone when my manager tried to get ahold of me,” said King, who met manager Alan Bezozi in 2010. “I would talk to him on payphones.”

The hard times turned into good times: Within weeks of its September release as a single, “Ex’s and Oh’s” caught the attention of U.S. listeners and worked its way up to No. 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart while reaching the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs, Alternative Songs and Adult Top 40 charts.

And being without a phone still didn’t stop King from falling in love and breaking up with boys — the subject of her hit single and most of her debut album.

In fact, in February she announced her engagement to Scotsman Andrew Ferguson, posting an Instagram pic of the couple on a sailboat under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay, where the proposal occurred.

The couple posted the story of their whirlwind romance and engagement on wedding site TheKnot.com: After three days together in London, King was flying home to the U.S., turned to a person nearby and said, “I’m going to marry him.”

Thirteen days after they met, Ferguson proposed. She said yes.

And when she turned 27 on July 3, King tweeted, “26 was the biggest year of my life. I’m so excited to see where 27 will take me!”

Despite singing about leaving an international wake of brokenhearted exes, King has long insisted she’s no man-eater.

“It’s so beautiful to love a person, but it’s like, it sucks. It just sucks when it doesn’t work out, and so I’d rather just have fun while I’m young and maybe I’ll get married when I’m 70, to a few people,” the raspy-voiced singer said in an interview last year.

“Ex’s & Oh’s,” a sultry laundry list of real-life breakups from the singer’s 2015 album “Love Stuff,” details four of King’s past relationships. The song has been certified platinum and was nominated for two Grammy awards, for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song.

King is not too concerned about how her exes feel about the track.

“I’m sorry,” she said to her exes before quickly rethinking the apology. “I’m not. Thank you. Boom! Look what happened!”

Heartache flows throughout the debut album, named after a sex shop King drove past in Florida. “Love Stuff” was released on Feb. 13, 2015.

She sings about a toxic relationship in “Under the Influence,” the second single from the album, and offers a stern warning to future boyfriends in “I Told You I Was Mean.”

The album takes a dark, soulful turn with the eerie “Ain’t Gonna Drown” and then a surprising optimistic swing with “Make You Smile,” an upbeat track about how far she’d go to make that special someone happy. And bluegrass influences shine through while she plays the banjo on the haunting “Kocaine Karolina.”

Early this year a third single from the album was released. “America’s Sweetheart,” with its refrain of “kick out the jams, kick up the soul, pour another glass of that rock ’n’ roll,” cements King’s image as a tough-talking, hard-partying woman who behaves to please herself rather than meet mainstream expectations.

Collaborators on the album included Jeff Bhasker, 2016’s Grammy Award-winning producer of the year, who has also worked with Fun., Kanye West and the Rolling Stones; and Mark Ronson, known for his work with Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars and Paul McCartney.

King says she’s inspired by Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton — her dream collaborator — and rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson, as she intertwines blues, country and rock ’n’ roll.

The New York Times described her as “a sassy, hard-drinking, love-’em-and-leave-’em hellion with bad tattoos and a broad pedigree across rock, pop and country” who shares “Adele’s determination and Joan Jett’s stomp, Brenda Lee’s high-voiced bite and some AC/DC shriek.”

After she began to put her album together and adapt to the process of co-writing songs, common with artists in search of chart-topping hits, she begrudgingly began to admit that she makes pop music.

“I used to be afraid of those three letters, but I’m not anymore. Now I understand that it’s just mainstream, it’s popular and I’m learning and I don’t care,” said King.

King was bitten by the showbiz bug at an early age. Her father is actor-comedian Rob Schneider, and in her youth she had a small role in his 1999 comedy, “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.”

“I just grew up around performers,” she recalled. “I just loved it, and I’ve always wanted to be onstage and I never wanted to get a real job.”

The singer was primarily raised by her mother, London King, a model, and her stepfather in Ohio. She decided to change her last name when she turned 18. She calls her mother “my everything and my idol.”

“I took her last name,” she said. “I wanted to do it on my own so that when it did happen, right now, this moment, I could say, ‘Yeah, I did it myself. And I did it with my name.’”

Touring is now giving her a global perspective on her heritage. King’s paternal grandmother is Filipino, and King toured through the Philippines on her way to Hawaii. On Aug. 15 she tweeted, “Gettin’ my Tagalog on! Can’t wait to see where my family is from in Manila.”

VH1 was one of King’s early supporters, using her music in the 2012 reality series “Hollywood Exes” and as the theme song for “Mob Wives Chicago.”

In November King performed in the “VH1 Big Music in 2015: You Oughta Know” concert in New York, alongside fellow breakthrough acts like Hozier, George Ezra, Tori Kelly and James Bay, whom King toured with in the U.K.

In her latest song, “Good Girls,” released as part of the rebooted “Ghostbusters” soundtrack, she sings, “Since I’m going to go to hell anyway, I’ll go out with a bang, crashing and burning all the way.”

In the video accompanying the new track, King dons a leather jacket, downs shots of liquor and tells us, “I do what the good girls don’t.”

But in May King told People magazine, “Being in love has changed me. … I can out-drink and out-party the best of ’em, but it’s nice to not want or need to do that anymore.”

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TGIF editor Elizabeth Kieszkowski contributed updated information to this report.