Island
Pop, 2025
The Epilogue is everything Shawn Mendes has been desperately trying to create for years, except Dean Lewis actually pulls it off. He does it too without the benefit of Calvin Klein campaigns, carefully curated Instagram thirst traps, or a PR team working overtime to convince us he’s deep. It’s almost unfair, really.
Yes, Dean Lewis’s voice can sound eerily similar to Mr Mendes at times – that same breathy, intimate quality that’s become the hallmark of modern sensitive-guy pop. But here’s the crucial difference: he sounds like Shawn Mendes if Mr Mendes actually had the vocal control, emotional depth, and songwriting chops to match his ambitions. He understands how to modulate his voice to actually convey genuine emotion.
It’s like comparing a wine enthusiast to a sommelier – they’re both talking about grapes, but one actually knows what they’re doing.
Take All I Ever Wanted. Yes, it’s lovelorn. Yes, it’s melodramatic. Yes, it traffics in the kind of emotional intensity that could power a small soap opera. But here’s the thing – it works. The chorus burrows into your brain like an earworm with a PhD in psychology, setting up residence and refusing to leave.
You’ll find yourself humming it at inappropriate moments – during work meetings, while grocery shopping, possibly during a funeral. It’s the kind of song that makes you feel things even when you’re not entirely sure what those things are, which is basically the holy grail of pop songwriting.
Trust Me Mate tackles the subject of addiction and recovery with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer wrapped in good intentions. On paper, it should be insufferable, but Mr Lewis’s vocal delivery is so impassioned, so genuinely committed to the emotional weight of the subject, that it transcends its own heavy-handedness. His voice is so damn easy on the ears that he could probably sing a grocery list and make it sound like a profound meditation on modern existence. The man has the kind of vocal tone that makes you want to trust him with your deepest secrets and also maybe your Spotify password.
Perhaps the most impressive achievement of The Epilogue is how Mr Lewis manages to pack genuine emotional weight into songs that are also supremely catchy. These aren’t just think-pieces with melodies stapled on – they’re proper pop songs that happen to have substance.
For now, at least, Dean Lewis can rest easy knowing he’s seized the title of “Superior Breathy Pop Singer” from Shawn Mendes without even really having to fight for it.
