Skyrocketing from soul-pop starlet to household name, Olivia Dean’s chart-topping album rollout tracks have soundtracked this summer. The Art of Loving captures the sunny charm of these lead singles, combined with Dean’s signature ballads that draw attention to love in all corners and crevices of life: “the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life.”
With an aim to “sing for everyone”– as she told interviewers – the project is a conscious fusion of style for wide appeal. In a nod to bell hooks’ All About Love– the book that inspired the project via Mickalene Thomas’s painting of the same name– Dean croons, “Gotta throw some paint, that’s what bell would say.”
This intro, with hazy harmonies, celebrates a new avenue as a lesson of growth.
With syncopated light guitars and a bossa nova feel, we sway through ‘So Easy (To Fall In Love)’, where new romance is met with relaxed confidence. ‘Man I Need’ treads similar ground in a chart-made, sugar-coated ode to falling head-first. But it’s ‘Nice To Each Other’ that sets Dean’s love songs apart. She sings of honesty and equal footing without binding commitment under a driving bass and underwater atmosphere. Similar relationship re-definer ‘Something In Between’ sees Dean battle to remain honest to herself in the face of a claustrophobic relationship.
Like Thomas pulling on the Harlem Renaissance, Dean threads her album through the textures of 70s soul and 90s neo-soul– different generations’ arts of loving. The vibrato-cranked horns after the beautiful chorus of ‘Let Alone the One You Love’ (a call to Al Green and Marvin Gaye classics), the persistent vinyl crackle wrapping the tracklist in melancholic nostalgia and warm string arrangements all place The Art of Loving within a lineage of longing. However, this is refracted through her own unstuffy, North London sensibility. The record feels like the residues of her musical heritage, layered with chic polish.
That said, the weight of our social media age’s cliches lurks. Dean’s new ‘neo-soul’ in 2025 finds itself in a strange bind: a publicist-scripted TikTok strategy on one hand, her soulfulness on the other. The bind is negotiated with style and defended by tongue-in-cheek charm, but you can hear the strain.
Even while navigating competing pressures, Dean makes room for introspective and intimate songs of self-worth. The folkish ‘Loud’ is the furthest we are shown into what feels like Dean’s most interesting otherworld; the movingly unusual and stripped back harmonics make it one of the standout songs.
‘Baby Steps’, despite on-the-nose lyrical cliches, is a declaration of gradual self-growth, regardless of romance. “I’ll be my own pair of safe hands” echoes back to the faith in the universe’s destiny as well as self-control explored in ‘Lady Lady.’
She deftly courts the mainstream with hits and personal appeal, whilst twisting away from within. The paint’s been thrown, and it’s far from wallpaper music. Once again, Olivia Dean leaves a dazzling mark– her art of loving is shared; “it’s all around you all the time.”
“Olivia Dean – Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park – 20250706 – 115 (cropped) (cropped)” by Raph_PH is licensed under CC BY 4.0.