While the pop girls skewer boys, Olivia Dean’s ‘Man I Need’ has hope

If there’s a crucial message to be distilled from the collected pop songs made by young women in the last few years, it’s that boys can kick rocks.

The men these young artists find themselves entangled with, they sing, are idiots and vampires. They’re dudes who take you on a date and don’t actually ask you a single question, or they treat you like “s*** on [their] shoes.” They’re just manchildren, in the parlance of Sabrina Carpenter’s latest hit, who can’t take care of themselves, flailing through life. Often these insults are sung less in anger than with what sounds like humorous, even self-deprecating exasperation, guffawing at the sorry state of what’s available to them as women in their 20s trying to date in an era when major news outlets consistently print thinkpieces asking if “men are okay.” “Maybe I can fix him?” Olivia Rodrigo asked, with a laugh, on 2023’s “get him back!” after listing a litany of faults (“an ego, a temper and a wandering eye”) an irredeemable but irresistible ex-boyfriend possessed. Apparently that’s all some girls can hope for.

Olivia Dean hopes for more. At first glance, the 26-year-old English singer, whose 2023 debut album Messy was shortlisted for the U.K.’s Mercury Prize, shares little in common with pop peers who’ve found success in saltily degrading potential suitors. The artist hails originally from the BRIT school, the prestigious London music school that also produced Adele and RAYE, and Dean’s work plays with the same familiar, brassy English soul influences those artists pull from. Her songs about love and even romantic ambivalence have an airy, seductive simplicity, her warm voice built for first dances at weddings and blockbuster rom-com montages featuring the lead actors falling in love over candlelit dinners and respectable small plates. And even when she’s ragging on someone who gets on her nerves — admittedly “picking a fight” — Dean doesn’t sound like she’s fighting one bit. She sounds cool and collected, resigned to however the situation might play out.

Dean’s “Man I Need,” which was her first song to chart on Billboard‘s Hot 100 and has been climbing steadily, sits in the same universe as so many of her peers’ songs about dating men of varying degrees of unavailability. But there’s zero snark here — no frustration, no rage. A self-described song about “knowing how you deserve to be loved and not being afraid to ask for it,” “Man I Need” is playful and light, its bouncy, jazzy pop piano setting the tempo as Dean sings of trying to reign in a lover who is keeping her at a distance. “Just come be the man I need,” Dean sings. “Tell me you got something to give, I want it.”

On the surface, “Man I Need” fits into that growing catalog of “get it together, boys!”-themed pop hits helmed by fed-up young women. But it doesn’t communicate the same sass or intensity as of her peers’ songs in that space, and maybe because of that, it lacks the same feeling of real, human investment. There’s something about “Man I Need” that reminds me of a cardboard cut-out, like the song is merely an advertisement for its earnest message rather than an embodiment of it. Like I could flick my finger at its edge and it might topple over in the lobby of a movie theater. That might be because it sort of sounds like a stage musical number, the groundwork of what could be a real life conversation dramatized into a sprightly, transparently retro performance. That the song’s music video takes place on a soundstage (as her other videos have) with the innards of some sort of production exposed, Dean dancing in front of hand-painted backdrops and moving sets pushed in and out of frame by a multiplying group of handsome men, only emphasizes the music’s self-aware facade.

But “Man I Need” also feels like cardboard because Dean’s demands are thin. She just wants him to talk to her — “whatever the type of talk it is,” really — and at one point non-committedly drops that she’s already given him “the time and the place, so don’t be shy.” In the song’s mushiest greeting card line, she allows that “I kinda like it when you call me wonderful.” Despite being billed as a song that isn’t afraid of expression, “Man I Need” hedges, takes the easy way out, settles for sentimentality. Of the singles released from Dean’s new sophomore album The Art of Loving, I’m more partial to “Nice to Each Other,” which, despite its similarly peppy instrumentation, plays like it was written by a person actually immersed in the realities of a relationship, this one casual but not without emotions or stakes involved. “We could be nice to each other, wrong for each other, right for each other,” she sings, sitting in the relationship’s shifting ambiguity. It’s a simple, swaying chorus, and when Dean sings it, with the echoes of backup singers behind her, the song sounds like it could have been penned for a ’60s girl group. It also doesn’t sound like taking the easy way out.