Arthur Hill Realises He Might Not Be the Only Guy Drinking Orange Wine
Arthur Hill turns modern dating, questionable claims of individuality and his own image into the joke on new single ‘Orange Wine’.
There are few things worse than walking into a bar and discovering your entire personality has already arrived. Arthur Hill’s ‘Orange Wine’ lives somewhere in that nightmare. Tattoos? Check. Nice clothes? Check. Slightly smug drink choice? Obviously. Then you look around and realise there are five other blokes doing exactly the same thing.
That is where ‘Orange Wine’ finds its joke. Rather than pretending he sits above the clichés attached to him, Hill leans straight into them, turning the little things people use to categorise each other into a song about finding out you might be far less original than you thought.
The track takes a lighter route than some of Hill’s more emotionally direct writing. Its humour comes from a familiar insecurity: thinking your clothes, tattoos and drink choice say something individual about you, only to look around and realise half the room has arrived at roughly the same conclusion.
‘Orange Wine’ drops that thought into a dating scenario. Hill is trying to charm someone while slowly becoming aware that the things he thought made him interesting might simply make him exactly the type of bloke he thought he wasn’t.
His voice remains one of the easiest parts of his music to pick out. There is a haziness to Hill’s indie-pop vocal that sounded especially strong live at Reading & Leeds this summer, and here it gives the witty writing enough character without forcing every punchline. Lyrically, he keeps things playful, while towards the end the track opens up and gives itself more room to breathe, with loose ad-libbed lines floating over the pop-infused beat.
The RELTA-directed video makes the central joke considerably worse for him. Hill appears alongside a line-up of men styled suspiciously like him while trying to convince a love interest that he is different. It is hard to sell your individuality when several near-copies of yourself are standing a few metres away.
Arthur makes himself the easiest target. There is a point underneath it about reducing somebody to their clothes, tattoos or drink choice, but he gets there without turning the song into a lecture. The humour works because he is completely included in the joke.
Comedy has long been part of Hill’s personality, and ‘Orange Wine’ gives it more room inside the music. After a year that has included a Wembley Arena headline show and a Main Stage appearance at Reading & Leeds, there is something pleasing about following it with a song centred on losing a flirting battle to your own aesthetic.
The release also arrives as Hill prepares for his Arthway Round the World headline tour in 2027, with dates across the UK and Ireland, North America, New Zealand and Australia.
But ‘Orange Wine’ works because it has little interest in presenting another career milestone.
Instead, Arthur Hill has made a pop song out of the moment you realise the personality traits you thought belonged to you might actually belong to half the room. At least he noticed.
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