Canadian singer/songwriter Olivia Lunny delivers a dynamic breed of alt-pop, instantly infectious but full of emotional depth. After taking up guitar and writing her first song at age 12, the Winnipeg native soon ascended to national fame, earning a Western Canadian Music Award nomination for Pop Artist of the Year when she was 17 and scoring a Top 40 hit with her 2019 single “I Got You.” With her recent milestones including winning the Young Canadian Songwriter Award from the SOCAN Foundation and inking her own label imprint distribution deal with Universal Music Canada, the 22-year-old artist is now set to release her full-length debut: a self-titled body of work centered on her spellbinding vocals and incredibly resonant lyrics.
The follow-up to her acclaimed 2020 EP To the Ones I Loved, Olivia Lunny finds her working again with longtime collaborator AJ Healey, as well as with producers like Tommy Brown (Megan Thee Sad To See You Happy,” a radiant piece of indie-pop she and her co-writers dreamed up while discussing the paradoxes inherent in love. “We were playing around with words and found ourselves exploring the concept of ‘love you to death’ and being ‘sad to see someone happy,’” Lunny recalls. “We loved the idea of playing off of an oxymoron—this was the through line in our songwriting process.”
Although Olivia Lunny offers up everything from the brilliantly glitchy beats of “Crazy Love” to the shimmering disco grooves of “Who Could Say No,” the album slips into a more pensive mood on tracks like “The Walls”—a starkly arranged folk song threaded with her graceful guitar work and delicate vocals. “For me that’s the most soulful song on the album,” says Lunny, whose most recent inspirations include double-threat artist/songwriters like Julia Michaels and Sia. “I sat down one day and picked up the guitar, and the chorus just came out. It sort of sparked from the idea of being in toxic relationship, and the push and pull that happens when you’re with somebody that you know you really shouldn’t be with.”
By bringing so much spontaneity to her songwriting, Lunny ultimately created a debut album that’s both emotionally raw and gorgeously nuanced in its exploration of love and its many dimensions. “I’d love for these songs to become part of the soundtrack to people’s experiences—whether they put on a sadder song to get their feelings out and cry, or put on one of the poppier songs to celebrate,” she says. “As an artist that’s all you can really wish for: to leave an imprint on somebody’s life, and let them know that someone else understands what they’re feeling.” Stallion, Ariana Grande) and Boi-1da (Lana Del Rey, Drake) and co-writers like Melanie Fontana (Dua Lipa, Britney Spears) and Whitney Phillips (Christina Aguilera, Justin Bieber & Ariana Grande). While the album encompasses an endlessly magnetic sound—lush textures, dreamy guitar tones, bright and glossy beats—its sheer sonic power never overshadows Lunny’s songwriting, an element that’s greatly evolved over the past year.
“With this album as a whole, I was really excited to get back to my singer/songwriter roots in a way that I hadn’t on the last EP,” says Lunny. To that end, she sketched most of the songs on Olivia Lunny while holed up at her family’s cabin in Lake of the Woods (a boat-access-only area near Winnipeg). “We were in the middle of nowhere and it was perfect for writing, just me and my guitar,” says Lunny. “I ended up coming up with a lot of songs about navigating the crazy times that we’re in, and trying to figure out what a modern relationship looks like with all the distractions we’re constantly dealing with today.”
All throughout her debut album, Lunny shows her undeniable growth as an artist while revealing the refined musicality she first began cultivating as a little girl. Raised on classic-rock bands like Fleetwood Mac, she started playing piano as a child and later learned guitar from her father. “My dad dabbles in guitar, so he taught me a few chords and I started writing my own music pretty soon after that,” says Lunny, who names folk-leaning singer/songwriters like Ingrid Michaelson and Daughter among her earliest influences. “I’d strum away and the lyrics and song ideas would just come to me, and I’d track all of that in my journals.”
By the time she was 14, Lunny had taken the stage at the Winnipeg Folk Festival as part of the Stingray Young Performers Program (a showcase of young talent from across Canada), performing three of her original songs to a crowd of 40,000. As she honed her performance chops by gigging in local coffeehouses, Lunny independently released her debut EP, a 2018 effort that led to her WCMA nomination. Thanks to that breakout success, she soon caught the ear of the producers of music-talent competition show “The Launch,” then emerged as a winner on the show’s second season—a triumph that resulted in the early-2019 release of “I Got You.” Building on that momentum, Lunny next brought her electrifying live performance to high-profile events like WE Day in both Winnipeg and Ottawa, along with an opening slot for Lionel Richie at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage.
As she moved forward with her music career, Lunny sharpened her sound and brought her more sophisticated sensibilities to “Blacklight,” a powerfully hypnotic 2019 track created with the Juno Award-nominated duo Elijah Woods x Jamie Fine. In the making of To the Ones I Loved, Lunny purposely channeled even more vulnerability into her songwriting, a quality that infuses standout tracks like “Bedsheets”—an acoustic-guitar-laced ballad hailed by Ones to Watch as “heart-wrenching.” As the EP drew widespread attention, she soon scored her imprint deal with Universal Music Canada, and quickly got to work on her first full-length effort.
The inaugural release for her label (named Infinity And), Olivia Lunny finds her tapping into her creative intuition more confidently than ever before. “Making this record really taught me that the best songs are the ones you don't have to overthink—the ones that just happen organically,” she says. By way of example, she points to lead single”.
