Earlier this year, British singer Olivia Dean rented out a flat in East London that she repurposed into the perfect studio space. Following the buzz of her self-released hit single “OK Love You Bye” in 2021—which ended up nabbing her a record deal with EMI—the 26-year-old artist broke big with her Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Messy, in 2023, drawing in a growing audience with her honeyed voice and the warm, vintage bent to her brand of pop.
But she had come down with a case of sophomore album jitters. The singer had a successful, sold-out tour, so she sat down to write her follow-up album in Los Angeles. Those first songs, however, weren’t right. Reflecting on that time over a Zoom call in September, Dean tells W, “I just thought, If I did it the first time and I didn’t know what I was doing, can I do it again?”
The problem, she realized, was that she didn’t feel comfortable. To make the album she wanted to create—one that would allow her to write the vulnerable, honest lyrics for which she’d become known—she would need to return home.
Back in East London, she lugged her Yamaha piano, her guitars, and her prized fuzzy slippers into the new studio space. Friends and collaborators set up shop in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows where they could bask in the natural light. Slowly, her new 12-track album, The Art of Loving, began to take shape.
“I was always in someone else’s space trying to prove something,” she says. “[Now I had] this control and trust in myself and what I was making that I’d never experienced before.”
The new album, out now, is an exploration of modern romance, set to lush, jazzy arrangements that crackle with excitement and invite you in with their easy vulnerability. The singer feels wise beyond her years, finding a sense of comfort in the contradictions and confusion of love. In her viral single, “Nice to Each Other,” Dean is happy to savor a connection she knows won’t last long, but is consumed by uncertainty in “Close Up,” singing, “I can’t tell if you need me / Or want me all that much / Did I misread completely every single touch?”
The cover art for The Art of Loving, photographed by Jack Davison.
She leaves her fate up to the universe in the funk-laden “Lady Lady,” puts herself back together after a breakup on the shimmering, “Baby Steps,” and on the Motown-inspired track, “A Couple Minutes,” she finds the silver lining in a relationship that didn’t work out: “Love’s never wasted / When it’s shared.”
To her, love is a skill to be practiced and improved upon—something she learned from reading bell hooks’ All About Love, which served as one of the main inspirations for the album. “I’m aligned with her view that love is the most important thing in the world, and we don’t take it seriously enough,” Dean says.
As a chronicler of love, Dean’s diagnosis of today’s dating culture is that people are too quick to dispose of each other. There’s a line, she says, between holding out for what you deserve, and moving on the second things aren’t perfect. At her shows, the lyric, “I don’t want a boyfriend,” has become a rallying cry among her fans. But Dean’s feelings are more nuanced.
“I think it’s okay to want to be in love and to be loved,” she says. “But it’s a fine line between I don’t need a man or Men are trash, and that becoming a negative mind-set. I’m more interested in where feminism takes us from here. Can we find an equilibrium and learn to respect each other?”
Along with bell hooks, Dean credits her family with shaping her expectations of love. Her parents have been together for almost 30 years. “Perhaps that’s why I’m such a romantic,” she says. Meanwhile, the women in her life taught her she didn’t need to shrink herself to find love. Her mother, Christine, is a lawyer who became the deputy leader of the Women’s Equality Party in 2020, while her grandmother Carmen, the subject of Dean’s 2023 song of the same name, was part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants who helped rebuild the U.K. after World War II.
“It would have been impossible for me to not have developed into the feminist I identify as today because of them,” she says. “My mum and my auntie and my granny are too powerful. At the same time, there’s room for both: you can be this independent, strong woman and still have love. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.”
In the two years since Messy, Dean might not have all the answers, but she’s found the beauty in figuring it all out.
“I’ve only become more crystallized in the sense that romantic love isn’t the be-all and end-all of my life,” she says. “When you’re younger, you’re led to believe that it is, but I feel love in so many areas of my life.”
It’s a sentiment she echoes on the album’s closing track, “I’ve Seen It.” “Writing it, I’d had a lot of red wine,” she recalls with a laugh. “When I heard it back for the first time, I burst into tears.” It’s a sweet song, sung over a simple handpicked guitar melody. Without ever saying the word “love,” she manages to capture the feeling precisely. “It felt like the loveliest note to end on,” she says. “Whether it’s within your friends, your family, or just the love that exists in the strangers around you, it’s there, and it’s inside of you, too.”
