We have some notes about the vowels, Mimi…

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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A vocally talented, pleasantly floral, sonically-of-the-moment offering from an emergent Tik Tok star that slots anonymously into the current teenage melodrama renaissance. 
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Dorian Sinclair: To some extent I can’t help but compare “Good Without” to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U“. Beyond the titular similarity, both narrators are in a similar position, still caught up in a former relationship when the other person shows every sign of having moved on. In that comparison, “Good Without” suffers a bit; its melancholy may match my own experiences better than Rodrigo’s fire, but it’s less dynamic, and the lyrics look vague next to Rodrigo’s pointed specificity. It’s not bad — the melody is decent and I particularly like the slow build of the piano — just a bit generic, especially its chorus.
[5]

Jeffrey Brister: Feels like I’ve always already heard this song, given how pervasive every element of its construction is: the affected coo, airy and booming arrangement, the whoa-oh’s. Nothing novel, nothing new, no value-add to make this particular instance stand out. I’ll get it confused with another song playing over an uplifting trailer or the closing moments of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I’m certain.
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Ian Mathers: Can someone please tell me where this particular vocal timbre that’s everywhere now originated? It does feel British, is it Adele? Ellie Goulding? A mix of the two? If I am hearing some Adele, at least she makes it sound a lot better. (This is probably the recent nadir of the form, at least for me.) Anyway, it’s everywhere right now and I hate it, and here the remix is much better both for giving it a bit of pace and also by swallowing the worst excesses of the style.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Posting an opinion on “Good Without” means reckoning with the stew of influences in which it bobs. I don’t doubt Mimi Webb’s sincerity, but from the swell of backup vocals to the starchy insistence of her own performance there’s a cynicism to the way it refuses to offer a moment of originality. 
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Katie Gill: This might sound absolutely crazy…but Mimi Webb (or Mimi Webb’s songwriters) really should do country music instead. I know that this is supposed to be a big, impressive emotional pop song but honestly, swap out those guitars for something a little more acoustic and we’ve got something aggressively Kelsea Ballerini on our hands. Likewise, if you took a country spin on this song, it would make it more interesting and make a statement in the woefully barren field of women-focused country music. But as it is, the song feels oddly half-formed, like it’s waiting for a remix that will hopefully blast it right up to radio airplay.
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Edward Okulicz: Comes across like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” if the singer didn’t believe it for one second, which makes for a less catchy song but a more interesting story. The swelling backing vocals are kind of hacky, but taken in context of a singer struggling to convince the listener of something unbelievable, they work really well. I do fear for the ongoing health of English vowels though; to add to the ongoing trend of people singing the long-i vowel sound (like “bike”) as if it was “oy,” Webb sings the “a” in “heart attack” like an long i sound. I fully expect if she’s still performing this song in ten years, someone’s going to have a heart attoyck, probably me.
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Nortey Dowuona: The plucked guitars lift behind Mimi’s soft, pliant voice as plopping piano drops cycle around her feet. Then the KanYeezy bass barges in with the Puff the Radio Dragon drums hammering down as Mimi’s echoes roar. Mimi makes her way as the pistachio shell drums bubble inside the piano drops, looking around, then leaping away, lifted by her roaring echoes, with Mimi soaring into the piano drops and disappearing.
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Samson Savill de Jong: This is so aggressively dull. Because Mimi Webb is a young women writing about heartbreak there’s an easy comparison to be drawn with Olivia Rodrigo, but instead I’d like to contrast Mimi with Adele. That might not seem fair, given that Adele is a far better singer and is attempting to make more complex music, but Adele succeeds at something that Mimi fails at. Namely, Adele is able to take her personal issues and make them sound big and universal. “Good Without” is attempting to do a similar thing, trying to make Mimi Webb’s heartbreak sound big and important, but it falls flat. In part it’s because Mimi just isn’t a strong enough singer to put the required emotion into her voice (and I hate the vocal effect they use every time she sings “last” in the chorus with a burning passion). It’s also because the song is so generic, and so predictable, that it’s impossible to feel like there’s any emotion to it. So instead of empathising, I’m just utterly bored.
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