OLIVIA J. BENNETT

I’m an arts writer, researcher and critic based in Australia, open to commissions and collaborations.

I also work as a freelance communications specialist across brand, content and cultural strategy.

If you’d like to see my portfolio or chat about a project, feel free to get in touch.

Gertrude Contemporary Emerging Writers Program | 2020
Melbourne International Film Festival’s Critics Campus | 2019

JONATAN

Yung Lean

Written by Olivia J. Bennett
Edited by Isabella Trimboli
Published in print by The Big Issue AU
Issue #737 | 23 May 2025

Cloud rap’s Swedish sadboi laureate Yung Lean returns with Jonatan, an album convinced of its own depth, even as it drifts from what once made him compelling. It opens with ‘Might Not B’, a Frankensteinian splice of lyrics—Bill Withers, ABBA, and a Gil Scott-Heron nod: “Might not be such a bad idea if I never…” By the end, you might wish he’d taken his own advice. On ‘Horses’—a flogged nod to The Rolling Stones—shoegaze guitars and syrupy strings reach for transcendence but land in vapour. “Wild horses / Keep pulling me away from you”, he mumbles. Throughout, his vocals are under-enunciated and affectless—conversational to the point of disinterest. There’s this pompous genius-at-work energy: a Charli XCX co-sign and a shared visual world that once felt sharp and surreal. But where BRAT burned with clarity and control, Jonatan drifts—listless, self-impressed, and hollow. The mood feels like a half-baked Casanova suffocating you with second-hand epiphanies. Ultimately, this record drags the culturally cringe, indie twee sensitivities of his jonatan leandoer96 projects into the Yung Lean mythos—killing off the persona that once made him vital.