Olivia Dean The Art of Loving Review & Meaning

Try this for a 2025 chart story: Olivia Dean spent five weeks at Number Two last autumn. The only thing blocking her was a fake K-pop group from a Netflix cartoon called KPop Demon Hunters. If that sounded like a joke, it was not. Man I Need stayed stuck behind Golden by Huntr/x for four weeks. Four. And Dean’s other singles kept climbing anyway.

In October 2025, she became the first female solo artist in UK history to have four singles in the Top 10 simultaneously: Man I Need at Number Two, So Easy (To Fall in Love) at Number Six, Nice to Each Other at Number Eight, and her Sam Fender collaboration Rein Me In at Number Ten. The same week, The Art of Loving debuted at Number One on the UK Albums Chart while Man I Need hit Number One on the Singles Chart. She was the first British female solo artist to score the Official Chart double since Adele four years prior.

A neo soul singer from London becoming the fifth most played artist on Spotify globally was never the obvious outcome, not until she stopped leaning so hard on neo soul cliches and started pulling from 70s LA soft rock instead. The real shift is simpler: she refuses to sing lies.

“I don’t want to sing lies.”

The album treats love as something you build, not something that happens to you. The title track said it in forty seconds: “It wasn’t all for nothing, yeah, you taught me something.” Every relationship was practice for the next one.

The debut, Messy, had all the right ingredients. Vintage horn arrangements. Crackly vinyl intros. A Jools Holland Hootenanny appearance singing You Can’t Hurry Love. It was tasteful. It was fine. It was exactly what every British neo soul artist did.

The Art of Loving threw most of that out. Dean had been listening to 70s LA studios instead. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. The Carpenters. Yacht rock funk. Baby Steps was slick enough to slide off the deck of a Christopher Cross video. So Easy (To Fall in Love) borrowed the bossa nova lilt of The Girl from Ipanema but flipped the lyric into self-possession: “I’m the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of my life.”

Dean told Apple Music that the second album pressure was real: “How did I even make the first one? Who am I?” She had written a few songs she liked, then got lost. “There was a whole middle chunk where I was like, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m making bad stuff.” So she rented a house in East London for eight weeks, brought her own piano, and said whatever came out at the end would be the album. No more writing. That was the record.

Here is her creative rule, stated plainly to Apple Music: “I would never ever write something that wasn’t true or didn’t happen to me. It’s not interesting to me. I have to go up and sing it for maybe the rest of my life. I don’t want to sing lies.”

She told the And the Writer Is podcast the same thing, more bluntly: “I’ve written a lot of terrible music. There are a lot of songs you have to write to get to that song. You have to write ten bad versions to get to the eleventh version that is actually the concept crystallised.”

“I’m not somebody that writes all the time. I’m going to live and then I’m going to write about it. I only write good things when I’m compelled to do so.”

What changed was the directness. Dean wrote like someone who had actually been in a kitchen with a new partner: “I don’t know where the switches are, or where you keep the cutlery.” She told the podcast that she loves weird lyrics. “There’s no reason why the word ‘cutlery’ should be in a song. That’s ridiculous. But that’s what makes it special.”

Let Alone the One You Love became an anthem for everyone who had ever been told they were too much. The line “If you knew me at all, you wouldn’t try to keep me small” could be read as a breakup line, a family line, a friend line. Dean did not specify. She did not need to.

Loud was the one where you realised she could sing a Bond theme tomorrow. Her voice climbed over strings like someone leaving a room for the last time. The pause after “All you had to do was say” was louder than any scream. Then: “Here I am. Two hands at the piano.” Alone. That was the image.

Dean told NPR that Loud was the song that scared her most. “Vocally it’s quite exposing. There was originally one take that was recorded and then I never sang it again, because I just found it to be too intense… it’s not the most fun thing to share that somebody didn’t want to fall in love with you.”

She told the podcast that the best songs come from a specific place: “The deeper you go and the more you scare yourself, those are the things that resonate the most. Every time I’ve been like, ‘That song’s too much,’ or ‘I cried when I made that in the studio,’ those are always the ones that last. People can hear that.”

On vocal performance, she is ruthless about emotion over perfection. “If the note’s a bit janky but it made you feel something because her voice cracked there because she was sad, that’s more important to me than it being pitch perfect.”

Zach Nahome, who served as executive producer on the entire album, kept every instrument audible and still blended. He produced Nice to Each Other, Man I Need, Something Inbetween, and had additional production credits across the record. The high hats on Man I Need moved at a speed that made you want to snap along. The acoustic guitar on A Couple Minutes was miked so close you heard the pick scrape. Every little flaw. Made it better.

Dean described the Man I Need session to the And the Writer Is podcast: “I came in that day and there was a lot of energy in the room. We’d all never worked together before. I was like, ‘Guys, let’s make something really fun. I want to make something I can dance to.’ We started with the drum beat. I sat at the Wurlitzer and went bang. By the end of the week we had three ideas. I was driving to and from the studio at the weekend and I just played it again and again and again. I was like, okay, if I can listen to this again and again, I think other people might want to.”

Not every early session went like that. Dean told a story on the podcast about one of her first times in a professional studio. The producer said he liked to start songs by looking at the Top 40 and picking one to sing melodies over. There was a lot of AutoTune. The track started with an explosion sound, then high heels panned from left to right ear. She sent it to her manager, who replied with three poo emojis. “I’ve listened to that song twice,” Dean said. “I can’t listen back to stuff from that time.”

She learned to survive those rooms. “Get really good at saying no. ‘I don’t like that.’ Or ‘Can we try something else?’ I would spend the whole day thinking I really don’t like this idea but not having the courage to say, ‘Can we start something else?’ Then the day is wasted and you sit there feeling small. I’m really good now at going into any room and being like, ‘Hello, I’m Olivia.'”

Dean told Harper’s Bazaar that the first time she tried to read bell hooks’s All About Love, she put it down. “This is a bit confronting, bell. You are screaming at me out of these pages.” She wasn’t ready. “I’ve read it maybe two or three times now. It’s the only piece of writing I’ve read that talks about love as a skill and something that is political, spiritual, and healing.”

She told the And the Writer Is podcast that the album title came from an exhibition in Los Angeles called All About Love, which was a response to hooks’s book. “I was like, it would be interesting for me to make an album in response to the book and the exhibition, do a case study almost on love. I could learn about myself. I could document the last two years of my life. I could heal and close the chapter.”

The album is chronological, she said. “The chronology of the album is kind of as it happened.” It moves from the early flutters of So Easy (To Fall in Love) through the confusion of Something Inbetween to the quiet resolution of I’ve Seen It.

Love is really scary, Dean told Apple Music. It can make you feel powerless. “But making this album made me realise that I’m so full of it and I have so much to give, and it exists everywhere outside of romantic love. By the end, I just felt such a love for my friends and the women in my life and my family. It’s a skill, love. It’s not a fantasy mystical thing that happens to you if you’re lucky. You have to manifest it and cultivate it and keep working at it.”

She told Harper’s Bazaar that self-love did not come naturally. “I didn’t always feel beautiful. I had a lot of imposter syndrome about my writing and my singing at first. It took time and working on myself to realise that I’m the only one who has to live inside my brain, so I might as well make it a nice place to live. I think I’m great. I don’t think that’s narcissistic to say. I’m a good person. Somebody will be lucky to fall in love with me.”

The closing track, I’ve Seen It, came from a night of red wine. Dean cried hearing it back. You might have too. It was not about romance. She told Apple Music: “I think it was important for me to leave the listeners on a note of reminding them that perhaps romantic love isn’t the forefront of your life right now, but love exists in so many forms. It’s in your friendships. It’s in strangers. It’s in your parents. There is so much love to be shared. In the world right now, we need reminding that it’s all around us. You just need to look for it.”

“I guess it’s been inside me all along.”

Love wasn’t magic. It was something you had to keep doing, even when you got it wrong. Olivia Dean had been doing that for two albums.

She won the Best New Artist Grammy in February 2026, sold out four nights at the O2, and toured arenas. Four weeks behind a cartoon band. The chart gods have a strange sense of humour.

On this one, she finally sounded like herself.

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