olivia dean "man i need" classic or dud

Classic, but "A Couple Minutes" is the real keeper off the album

It's not a classic but I've enjoyed it more than her others.

unfortunately that is not an option in this poll

i really tried to hold off from giving myself full up to "man i need" but i sorta feel like it's apex target pop, up there w/ great bruno mars songs, leona lewis "bleeding love" dare i even say nick jonas "jealous" ... i need to take a breather but right now that is how i feel

The pluses: she sings with a restraint to match the arrangement. I love the watery keyboards over the verses and how she syncopates her voice to them. "Talk to me/talk to me" is a strong hook. I put it last fall on a '26 playlist before "Folded" and they complemented each other.

Probably a timing thing, but I haven't heard radio play for "Man I Need" as much as I'd expect. Pretty sure I'd elevated to jam level if I heard it enough.

i listen to a fair amount of sirius xm tooling around to child dropoff and stuff and it’s on their pop stations a lot. i never turn it off so i guess that means classic.

i prefer "so easy to fall in love" but i voted classic--it should be corny, as most other 'tasteful' pop&b of this ilk is (see: RAYE), but it works somehow

I don't know if "corny" works as a dismissal. I like "corny" if we mean "heart on sleeve gushing" and Olivia Dean is not K Michelle as a gusher.

it's not really either classic nor dud, unfortunately :( just indicative of how dull and bland pop music is right now. so i'll vote dud

it is played a lot on radio and i think "so easy" will be played even more

I put it last fall on a '26 playlist before "Folded" and they complemented each other.

I am finishing up a 2025 playlist and have a sequence of Folded > Luther > Man I Need (though that might change).

possibly slightly facile but i feel like her closest antecedent is corinne bailey rae circa "put your records on", so...i'm waiting for her "horse print dress" or black rainbows lol

kind of a nothing song imo

the transition from verse to chorus in this song is so good that i really have a hard time understanding that opinion

i like how the chorus juxtaposes the incredibly bad lyric "i kinda like it when you call me wonderful" with the incredibly good lyric "whatever the type of talk it is, come on then" ... we are containing multitudes

in all seriousness there is something about the production that just toes the line of tastefulness in a way that appeals to my sensibilities. like, this song edges up on taylor swift "shake it off" type plasticky motown capital one bonus miles pop but there's more depth to the production. there's that little guitar figure kinda pulsating under the beat that she emphasizes a bit on the humming outro... i love that outro. there's some alternate world version of this song where there is a really stupid call and response bridge or something but they kinda avoided a lot of those bad songwriting impulses and ended up w/ a really tight and still lush pop song

to be reductive about it if you constructed a continuum that had carly rae jepsen's tastefully done but ultimately niche pop music on one end and taylor swift's garishly capitalist and ultimately very popular pop music on the other end, "man i need" to me manages to exist close to the first pole compositionally while also achieving the success one strives for by hewing closer to the other pole

fantastic posts J0rdan

Yeah I love this song but as with pretty much all of Dean’s work it needs popular success to really validate its existence, given it sounds like an extremely well-designed AI purée of a billion other songs of the past. It always makes me think of brunch with other gay guy lawyers.

Agree with Alfred that the syncopation of the vocals on the verses is ace, esp. on “I like to think you feel the same way”

It's far more classic than dud but it isn't in my classic file yet

Last time I listened to this track the next thing that came up was a proper Larry Heard jazzy funk track and that made a lot of conceptual sense

I finally heard it on terrestrial radio this AM and sang every note of the chorus. Classic.

I'm really fascinated by how her duet with Sam Fender is so big (at least here in the UK) because his narrative has been about his authenticity and working-class roots and she seems to be more of a UK attempt at a pop diva? It would be like 90s Oasis doing a song with Kylie Minogue.

"Man I Need" is just a little too dull for me - the drums are weak and there's no real singalong moment to up the energy, and I'm not a big fan of that post-Winehouse affectation in her voice. I usually love pop songs in shuffle-time because they often feel so strident and playful but this just feels like a pop song at 50%.

Winehouse? I don't know, she sounds closer to Jamila Woods to me.

it's a lazy comparison and I won't deny that, but it's Winehouse I think of when I think of that poorly-enunciated, jazzy style of singing, and I think that her influence on the past two decades of pop music, especially UK pop music, has not been an overall positive

I wouldn't put her in the post-Winehouse mould at all

The thing I like about her vocals is how unaffected and understated they are

I usually love pop songs in shuffle-time because they often feel so strident and playful but this just feels like a pop song at 50%.

I feel like the presence of the first vibe largely depends on whether the pop song is in (even vaguely) a post T Rex / T Raumschmiere lineage - there’s a category of shuffle-time pop that is not really glam/strident at all but rather has a kind of gentle inevitability to it, like it’s constantly tripping forward slightly - more in the space between America’s “Horse With No Name” and Borneo & Sporenburg’s “Boys in Shorts”.

The feel of “Man I Need” rhythmically mirrors its status as an unassuming bop that sneaks up on you, the girl/boy next door the protagonist ends up with at the end of the film.

voting 'dud' aside i do enjoy this song and am glad it's a hit. i'm just not going to pretend there's anything transcendent about it. glad for you if you feel otherwise

otoh i do find "so easy" to be something of a mediocre bother but it has gotten stuck in my head multiple times so i guess it does its job effectively -- i'm still guessing that unfortunately it's going to be even bigger here

i've heard others make post-winehouse comparisons and don't think they're entirely without merit

even knowing how many american radio stations now opt for the later-is-better programming strategy these days i'm still rather surprised to hear you say you're only just now starting to hear it alfred!

she very much fits into the emerging category where people are starting to say "oh thank goodness for some soulful vocals again after all these years of bizarre squealing and whisper/mumble-pop", so we end up with her and raye and that sienna spiro girl

the transition from verse to chorus is so good. i don’t have the musical vocabulary to describe this precisely but the first line of the chorus is mapped over the production in a way that gives that momentary space in the construction of the three note piano riff the effect of a heart skipping a beat, and that makes the whole song for me. it’s subtle but there’s as much emotional lift in the transition from verse to chorus for me as there is in songs that are much more literal about it