Dylan doesn’t write love songs, precisely. The artist, born Natasha Woods, sings of preludes and endings, teasing completely different lanes of romance: from the dizzying excessive of a primary date to the various small infinities of heartbreak. The 23-year-old sharply juxtaposes youthful innocence – gasping in awe at a brand new love’s potential – with a pointy wit that means that anybody who does her flawed is ripe for a takedown: “Messing with my head for pleasure / You ain’t tall enough to act like that,” she affirmed on her straight-talking breakout hit, ‘You’re Not Harry Styles’. Clearly, she has a present for line supply that grants her takedowns a brilliantly spiteful glow.
On her debut mixtape, ‘The Greatest Thing I’ll Never Learn’, Dylan conveys this perspective with roaring guitars and the commanding hooks of Charli XCX’s ‘Sucker’ period. It’s a set of neon-pink energy pop that teases heavier influences, and maintains each tight riffs and a assured snarl. If this seems like rather a lot to swallow, you then’re completely proper: it’s a crowded however confident document – however Dylan has realized that by going for the massive emotions, she conjures up near-rapturous devotion. A UK headline tour booked for subsequent spring has been lengthy offered out, following a 2022 spent taking part in over 100 reveals and supporting each Ed Sheeran and Tate McRae.
After discovering an viewers on TikTok throughout the pandemic, Dylan seeks to distinguish herself from her friends by her humour; she embraces and sometimes lampoons her personal independence. “Sex, pay cheques, relationships / Everything will go to shit”, she sings on ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’, operating right into a glittering, booming refrain that recollects the reckless enjoyable of The Pointer Sisters. ‘Blue’, a mid-tempo ballad about giving your coronary heart the area it wants to harm, proves that she will attain for anguish, too: “Have you had enough? / Of being apart / And forcing a spark with someone to close the hole in your heart?”.
It’s these moments of candid songwriting that make ‘The Greatest Thing I’ll Never Learn’ really feel such as you’re peeking into somebody’s fleeting ideas on a personal Twitter account – the proper soundtrack as one other wonderful Hot Girl Summer fades into autumn. Dylan’s sharp lyrics mirror the vivid manufacturing: the high-speed, dramatic synth stabs on ‘Lovestruck’ and concord layering on ‘Girl Of Your Dreams’ are each supercharged with color.
The mixtape’s consistency is a credit score to Dylan’s megawatt presence, however there are temporary moments the place the tempo turns into so brisk that the main focus strikes from element to hurry: ‘Treat You Bad’ is hurried and breathless, weighed down by a thumping drum beat. But in any other case, she proves that her self-belief is her strongest stance: this can be a main label debut with unfiltered character in abundance, a rarer commodity than it ought to be in the present day in UK pop.
Details
- Release date: October 27, 2022
- Record label: Island