Without any of the gothic production flourishes that put him on the map, the producer and songwriter’s latest album is gloomy, on edge, and disappointingly hollow.
In a recent, live interview for the New Yorker, Billie Eilish was asked to recount how she had experienced the onset of the pandemic. She was on tour, busy and oblivious to the news, she said; she didn’t notice what was happening until she was canceling shows. “I wasn’t looking at my phone,” she explained. Seated next to her in the Zoom frame, her brother Finneas O’Connell piped up: “I was.”
Finneas has something he’d like you to know: He’s been paying attention. Finneas acknowledges his privilege and his whiteness; he’s caught up on politics, has thoughts on cancel culture, and wonders if our phones are poisoning our brains. Finneas is young, only 24, but perhaps he has some wisdom to share: Make the most of your finite time on this earth. Also, call your parents.
These are some of the talking points on Optimist, the misleadingly named debut album from the songwriter and producer best known for his ongoing creative partnership with his younger sister, one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Without any of the gothic production flourishes that put him on the map, Finneas—single-handedly, as its sole producer, writer, and, on 12 out of 13 tracks, instrumentalist—made an album that’s gloomy and on edge, encumbered by the alienation of life in the digital era as magnified by the distorting lens of fame and new money.
Optimist enters into dialogue with recent albums by other young stars disenchanted with success and the world that gave it to them: Lorde, Clairo, and, of course, Eilish herself. Aesthetically, these records are united in their movement away from pop bombast and towards softer, slower sounds with less commercial traction. Finneas is on board, to some degree—about a third of these songs are piano ballads; one is an instrumental interlude that does little besides demonstrate his proficiency. The O’Connell siblings share a well-documented fondness for mid-century standards, and Finneas sings in a warm, searching baritone—often double-tracked for maximum texture—that performs nicely in songs indebted to them.
But while bidding for timeless and universal appeal, Finneas sometimes comes up with hollow platitudes. “Only a Lifetime” cautions us not to “waste the time you have/waiting for time to pass,” while “What They’ll Say About Us” lays plans to “take the world and make it better than it ever was.” These are pleasant but toothless sentiments, fit to print in frilly cursive on plaques sold at Home Goods. Occasionally, he hits on something more stirring, like on “Love Is Pain” when he recalls waking in tears from a dream about his parents’ death—demonstrating the very real consequences of getting older rather than vaguely fretting about them.
Finneas’ exercise in restraint has its limits: These subdued songs are surrounded by highly produced, pointedly topical ones. On the hyperpop-y “The 90s,” Finneas longs to retire from the internet and return to the decade of his birth (“when I was not a problem yet”). When he sings, “Now my head feels so heavy,” his voice is glitched out, producer-speak for “I feel alienated.” “Medieval” laments the churn and burn of the celebrity machine with a snarling vocal delivery over a percussive rumble; the playful, plinky “Happy Now?” stumbles on the revelation that fame and money and a “douchebag car” isn’t a recipe for happiness.
Listening to an album that hits such extremes of texture and tone is jarring, much like contemporary digital existence. Maybe that’s the point. Whether intentionally or not, Finneas replicates these all-too-familiar conditions without submitting anything new to the discourse. “The 90s” uses an idea that has been passed around by some other pop (and pop-adjacent) singers—but without the developed narrative arc of Sam Hunt’s take, or the self-aware camp of Charli XCX’s, it falls flat. The satirical intent of “The Kids Are All Dying”—a smarmy song that, it must be said, contains the biggest groaner of all in “I’m whiter than the ivory on these keys”—is undercut by the song’s lack of a target. Instead of scrutinizing one culprit with rigor and bite, Finneas gestures wildly to the ether, citing climate, war, capitalism, gun violence, Twitter activism, and fake news, his narrator slipping between the voice of the critic and that of the criticized.
As a critic, Finneas can do much better. And he has: He co-wrote “Your Power,” a clear-eyed, affecting indictment of abusers on his sister’s recent album, Happier Than Ever. The unavoidable context for Finneas’s debut is, of course, the magnitude of what he’s already achieved. So when he sings, “Now all your memories feel more like films/… /You wonder why the bad ones paid the bills,” on “Someone Else’s Star,” I can’t help but think how much more eloquently Billie captured her own curdled relationship to art and commerce: “Things I once enjoyed/Just keep me employed now.” Maybe it’s unfair to foist this comparison upon Finneas, but he does seem to invite it by dropping his album mere months after Billie’s, with a noticeably similar title.
Very much to his credit, Finneas has shaped some of the past decade’s most memorable pop music. Three years ago, he sampled a dental drill and an Easy-Bake Oven on a song that would go triple platinum—choices that felt freaky, unexpected, and daring. Now, on “Someone Else’s Star,” he’s sampling rainstorms, dampening an already dreary track with a too-obvious signifier. The biggest risk that Finneas takes on Optimist may just be invoking inflammatory topics to which he brings limited insight. By the end, it’s all a wash anyway; Finneas throws up his hands and goes out on “How It Ends” (sigh), a disco-lite track that hinges on timeless pop wisdom about dancing away the pain. Bop away while you shield your eyes from the news.
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