Who Is Olivia Dean? The Voice Behind "Man I Need," Today’s Best Retro Pop Song

For this week’s Sunday Stream, a close listen to “Man I Need” by Olivia Dean, a young star from Britain who makes old sounds feel new again.

Sep 21, 2025

Recently, there has been a mini-trend happening in music that I find a bit worrisome, or, at the very least, boring: a kind of plucky mid-century retro-ness that verges on downright retrograde. This is not to call out any specific artist, because I think many of its practitioners are talented and promising, with plenty of room to grow and develop in fascinating ways. Spotify’s “Retro Pop” playlist, which includes everyone from Madison Beer to Jon Batiste, is perhaps the best window into this “vintage” feel, filled with young artists who seem to treat making new music like they’re trying on old 501s at the thrift shop. And when I hear Laufey’s bossa nova shuffle on “Lover Girl” — so moddish it sounds like something your grandparents would’ve had a martini to in 1961 — or Mark Ronson’s Motown-ish swing on Raye’s “Suzanne,” I can’t help but feel the weight of cultural inertia. I know that we all love Amy Winehouse — who, alongside her producer Ronson, essentially invented this idea of modern retro-ness — but Amy was special, and she was able to infuse a sense of life and urgent honesty into old forms. Not everyone is her.

Look, in our age of flattened internet nostalgia, everything old sounds new again. I get it. We live in a time defined by what some call “hauntology” — a term partly popularized by music writers Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher — in which the specter of the past is all around us all the time, refusing to loosen its grip on the present. I don’t want to get too sidetracked by theory, but I’m sure you understand the general gist: in films, we get sequels, remakes, and reboots. In fashion, we get edgy takes on Y2K styles or 1970s bohemian glamour. We’re subsumed by the good ole’ days, collaging together art from the detritus of decades past. Blame the internet, blame capitalism’s lack of fresh ideas, blame whoever you want — the ancient is everywhere. The proof is in the pudding.

I still think we can do something a bit more ecstatic with these tools rather than just create straight-up facsimiles. Enter Olivia Dean. The young British singer with a retro — and yet somehow still refreshing — sensibility has become a sensation online, and has amassed over 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Some of her early songs were more straightforwardly precious and antique — so much so that she made subtext into context by doing a Diana Ross impression in a black-and-white music video for one of her first hits, “The Hardest Part.” The track is lovely enough, the sort of song you’d expect to hear drifting through a brunch playlist while you eat avocado toast (complimentary?).

But it’s her latest single, “Man I Need,” that I truly adore. On its surface, it’s not a radical departure — a sweet little verse-chorus-verse-chorus pop song with a some light piano work, a sleek New Wave strut, and a 1960s sense of soulful catchiness. And yet, it absolutely sparkles. I’m not surprised to hear that she collaborated on it with Tobias Jesso Jr., a singer-songwriter I interviewed back in 2015 when his own solo music was attracting comparisons to Carole King and Harry Nilsson. Since, he’s been behind the scenes crafting real gems for artists like Adele, and, recently, he was all over Justin Bieber’s great new album, Swag.

But, beyond that, I’d say the strength of “Man I Need” is Olivia herself — she’s a woman with impressive pipes but, here, she uses a knowing and stylish restraint that gives the lyrics a quiet confidence and endearing friendliness. Be the man that I need is a nice message for a song — a hushed but clear request for a guy to step up to the plate and treat her right.

To be sure, I’m not saying that Olivia Dean is rewriting the playbook, really. If you want to hear something completely new, you’ll have to look elsewhere — or wait for Frank Ocean and Rihanna to return to music after their self-imposed exiles, carrying with them the elegant sounds from the future they’ve always been so adept at providing.

What I am saying is that aura still counts for something. You can replicate all the good ideas from music history you want, but if a song doesn’t have “it,” it doesn’t amount to much. I can grumble all day about the glut of retro in modern music, but the moment the right voice cuts through, all those complaints fall away. Look at the joy and charisma Olivia brings to a simple live performance of “Man I Need.” It’s a reminder, for me, of the most timeless ideal of all: that good is good, no matter the year, no matter the epoch. And Olivia Dean, to my ear, is good.

An example of the kind of retro-ness that I think is NOT healthy for the culture (no offense, Laufey, you seem like a perfectly nice and talented person!!!!):