Olivia O’Brien, a razor-sharp songwriter with a propensity for penning sad songs with an icy edge, has spent nearly a decade in the music industry searching for her sound and growing up in the public eye. With the release of her new EP, everywhere i go, there i am, out today, she gets one step closer to defining that sound and artistic identity.
O’Brien found viral success at 16 with “i hate u, i love u,” her collaboration with rapper-DJ gnash. She was quickly established as a Los Angelean cool girl with a preternatural knack for penning both shimmering pop hooks and downcast bedroom sonnets. Her 2019 full length debut Was It Even Real? and a series of “micromixtapes” (singles with two to three songs included each) honed her cool-girl approach to the confessional. Simply take “Sad Songs in the Summer,” a gloomy and pining bedroom cut with a chorus sung entirely in falsetto, or “Josslyn,” an irresistibly catchy (and deservingly) TikTik-boosted number about betrayal in an undefined relationship (“You had to go and ruin it / So you could get a quick fuck”), for example.
Much of O’Brien’s catalog can be sorted into two categories, one of which being sad and sometimes stinging songs about unrequited crushes, messy breakups, and the kind of guys you’d want your friends to steer clear of. The other common thread in O’Brien’s work is an at times brutal dissection of her mental health. Earlier this year she released love & limerence, an EP that focused on, well, love, and the absence of it. Everywhere i go, there i am expands upon its title’s age-old saying and chronicles the singer’s fluctuating mental health as she navigates early adulthood and the mess that it often carries with it.
“This project is very, very special to me,” O’Brien says. “It’s also all about my mental health, there’s not a single song that’s about, like, love or relationships or anything. It’s all just about me and my own struggles which I think is really special.”
The EP’s first single “lower” greets listeners with reverberating vocal notes layered manually to achieve an effect more resonant than a vocoder would provide. “And they say, they say that it’s only up from here / But I’ve hit a new rock bottom every single year,” she sings even keel. The song, and EP at large, maintains a generally acoustic sound, similar to love & limerence. This sonic progression — from the pop and rock-tinged bangers of her early career to the folksy acoustic spirit she seems more comfortable in now — is something O’Brien says was especially defined after writing “blip” from love & limerence.
“I feel really separate from a lot of things that I’ve made,” she says. “I thought that, you know, if you make happy, upbeat things, you’ll have a wider audience — which is kind of objectively true. Not everyone wants to listen to sad stuff. But I feel like I’m so much more connected with my listeners and just people in general when I release stuff like this that’s really raw and from the heart.”
Given how young O’Brien was when she was thrust into the spotlight and expected to find her artistic identity within the confines of the pop music machine, it’s no wonder that some of her previous work may feel isolated from the 24-year-old version of herself today.
“I’m not saying that any of the music I made in the past was bad by any means, I just feel like it didn’t represent me,” she says. “It’s just about being proud of what I do and feeling like it’s an accurate representation of myself, my interests and what I like.”
O’Brien has had quite the prolific run of singles and EPs since her debut LP. She’s spoken candidly about the forces that ultimately shelved the second half of what would’ve become her full length follow-up. Since parting ways with Island Records in 2023 (the label currently home to Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter), she’s continued to write new material in addition to revisiting older work left unreleased in her songwriting vault — including “how would i know” from the new EP, which was written in 2022. Releasing music in smaller doses has allowed O’Brien to feel closer to her work, rather than collecting songs for extended periods and growing out of their themes.
“Creating a whole album is hard, it takes time and you get over stuff by the time it’s ready,” she says. “So I was like, ‘How can I combine my micromixtape idea but also have a little bit more music on the projects and a little bit more of a concept?’” The solution for O’Brien was to release small batches of songs as EPs with alternating concepts at their core, with the intention of eventually combining them to create a greater project altogether. “It kind of is one project, just with two different meanings,” she says.
O’Brien says she wrote “blip,” “lower” and “all the time” shortly after one another, during a period in which she was struggling with her mental health and experienced a home break in. “I was really going through it when I wrote those songs,” she says. Given the raw and unguarded nature of the music, revisiting the material can prove to be both cringe-inducing and perilous at times.
“I will find journal entries or poems or things that I wrote when I’m really in a dark place, and when I’m in a good place, I’ll read it back and be like, ‘Oh my God, who wrote this is the most dramatic thing I’ve ever heard, I do not feel this way,’” O’Brien says. “Then the next week, I’ll somehow go back to that [dark] place, or even just like, slightly slip back into that feeling, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, yes, she was so right about that.’”
The EP’s quick run time of around 20 minutes offers a brief but engaging look into O’Brien’s psyche. As for where best to listen to this personal snapshot of a project, the singer’s got an idea for that.
“I’ve been really into sunsets lately,” O’Brien says. “I think that you should start [playing the EP] right before sunset, and then watch the sunset, and then when the project is finished it’ll be dark outside.”
“Memory lane,” the most upbeat of the project’s five songs and one that’s bound to strike a chord with those who fall into endless doom scrolling through camera rolls and Instagram archives. Opposite the four other song’s hushed, acoustic vulnerability, “memory lane” offers a dose of desolate reminiscence countered with a twinkle of sonic optimism. The song’s lyrics (“Every time I think of then it feels like a past life / In a couple months I’ll feel that way about last night,”) are combatted by mid-tempo percussion and a flowing electric guitar line. Similarly to O’Brien’s ideal sunset listening scene, the EP may seem like it tracks the light fading, yet it also provides a kind of unexplainable glow — almost like the stars in a night sky do.
Keep up with Olivia O’Brien: Instagram // Spotify // X // TikTok // Facebook // Website
