Finneas – Optimist

Vinyl, LP, Album

The thing about FINNEAS’ full-length debut is that it doesn’t feel like a debut at all: As longtime producer and co-writer to his sister, Billie Eilish, he’s had a hand in shaping some of the most popular and influential music of the new century—and winning, in the space of a few years, more Grammys than he could hold at one time. But few producers have successfully made the leap to solo careers—Kanye and Pharrell among them—and fewer still have done it after such a seismic first impression. Marking the first time we’ve really heard the LA native entirely on his own, singing his own songs, Optimist functions as a kind of formal reintroduction. “It’s very hard to prioritize your own music, because it’s more excusable to let yourself down than to let other artists down,” he tells Apple Music. “The biggest challenge in making an album for myself is having to actually always look inward and be like, ‘Is this how I want it to sound?’ I’m not trying to please anybody with it except myself.”