{"id":74177,"date":"2025-08-17T22:40:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T22:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/74177\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T22:40:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T22:40:08","slug":"are-sam-fender-and-olivia-dean-saving-indie-collaborations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/74177\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Sam Fender and Olivia Dean saving indie collaborations?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sam<\/p>\n

(Credits: India Fleming)<\/p>\n

Sun 17 August 2025 14:00, UK <\/p>\n

Everyone\u2019s bored of talking about the indie pop drought. It\u2019s all too repetitive, too individualistic, too self-serving. Then Sam Fender<\/a> and Olivia Dean strolled along.<\/p>\n

Collaborations are quite a dying art among the popular sonic landscape. No doubt it has a lot to do, in general, with the reasons outlined; artists are just too concerned by their own success to ever share it out with others. But Fender and Dean are an unlikely match made in heaven \u2013 one machismo indie rocker and a sweet-souled pop star, who just work together.<\/p>\n

Indeed, their partnership with one another has become such a hit over the course of Fender\u2019s current tour, in which Dean stars as support act, that their joint rendition of the former\u2019s \u2018Rein Me In\u2019<\/a> has taken on a whole new lease of life of its own accord. Yes, on one hand it\u2019s a run-of-the-mill tune with a gendered love-torn split down the middle, but there\u2019s a swelling earworm within the tune that drives it straight to the heart.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be honest, I was a little sceptical at first when Fender announced Dean as his latest support act. They just seemed like chalk and cheese, the last two people you would ever put on a stage together. It wasn\u2019t that I disliked her or her music in any way, but with her heady mix of pop and swinging 1960s soul, undercut with his tones of gravelly indie and working-class roots, I just didn\u2019t see how the pairing would ever blend.<\/p>\n

But those apprehensions soon got blown entirely out of the water the second they hit the stage, with the electricity even palpating through the social media screen. The overwhelming audience reaction to their shared new cut of \u2018Rein Me In\u2019 was simply further testament to that. More and more, Dean is proving that she is not just part of the classic sonic lineage of the likes of The Supremes, but very much able to stand up as a force on her own two feet, with Fender simply helping to highlight that.<\/p>\n

Maybe the live and commercial success of their collaborative version of \u2018Rein Me In\u2019 has made the industry heads sit up and listen, or maybe it hasn\u2019t. But I can\u2019t shake the feeling that it would be a missed opportunity if they weren\u2019t to capitalise upon it further \u2013 not just in terms of Fender and Dean, but across the entire indie pop canon as a whole.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a whole barrage of artists right now who have the potential to create delectable collaborations, from CMAT to Folk Bitch Trio to Mac DeMarco. It\u2019s quite possible that together, they could not only pave a new path for the next generation of indie, both in their own artistic rights and together as a collective force. While the bands are gearing back into life, they too could cause the renaissance we have all been crying out for, for such a long time.<\/p>\n

If it were to happen \u2013 please, God, let it happen \u2013 Fender and Dean would very much be seen as the catalyst and at the forefront of the evolving indie offerings over the course of the rest of the 2020s<\/a>. They always say that in teamwork, collaboration is key, but it\u2019s high time that the music industry started reading from that same book once again.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: India Fleming) Sun 17 August 2025 14:00, UK Everyone\u2019s bored of talking about the indie pop drought.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,596,128,24275,37964,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-74177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-homepage","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-olivia-dean","12":"tag-sam-fender","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}