OLYMPIA Wants You to Mean It: Debut EP 'Have You Ever Been In Love?'

Ask anyone what they’re looking for in love and the answer now arrives pre-hedged. Nothing serious. No labels. OLYMPIA has no use for the hedge. Her debut EP, Have You Ever Been In Love?, is five tracks of the opposite: wanting too much, saying so, and staying with it until something holds.

The London-based singer-songwriter and producer draws on timeless songwriting and Greek poetry, and she has said plainly that she wants to bring romance back into a world of casual love. The EP opens on heartbreak and closes on surrender. In between it passes through desperation, longing and a stretch of plain happiness, in the order they tend to arrive. What makes the record argue rather than simply confess is where it places the loss. For OLYMPIA, heartbreak is a stretch of road rather than a dead end. “Whatever we lost was never meant for us,” she says. “It’s all part of the human experience: relationships, love, pain, until the final destination, which is love. Everyone is destined to love and be loved.”

That belief shapes how the record was made. She wrote, produced and arranged every song herself, and funded the project herself too. “The whole project was created entirely by me,” she says. “Every detail, every sound, every choice was made with love and care, as I tried to turn the feeling of the most magical emotion a human being can experience, being in love, into music.” An EP about refusing to settle for the casual version of anything was never going to be handed to a committee.

The refusal has a history. OLYMPIA grew up on a small island in Greece, where she says she always felt out of place, and at 19 she left for England alone, barely speaking the language. She taught herself English while studying at Leeds Conservatoire. She reached the final of The Voice of Greece and finished third, and the major label offers that followed would have made the next few years easier. She said no. After graduating in 2023 she moved to London, where she wrote, performed and collaborated while couch-surfing and holding down day work to pay for the music. In May she sold out The Water Rats, her launch show, on the strength of songs most of the room had not yet heard on record.

Someone who has made every hard choice on her own terms is not going to treat love any differently. Have You Ever Been In Love? is OLYMPIA asking the question and already knowing she’ll keep looking until the answer is yes.

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