The Art of Loving

THE ART OF LOVING: OLIVIA DEAN REWRITES THE BRITISH SOUL PLAYBOOK

Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving (Capitol/Polydor, 2025) is the sophomore album that made her the most commercially formidable British female solo artist of her generation — a 12-track pop-soul record built on meticulous craft, neo-soul warmth, and an almost disarming emotional intelligence. Released on 26 September 2025, the album debuted at No. 1 on the UK Official Albums Chart in the same week its lead single “Man I Need” topped the UK Singles Chart — a chart double no British solo woman had achieved since Adele in 2021. What followed was a months-long commercial run that would reframe expectations for what a UK artist of Dean’s lineage could accomplish in the modern album market: top-five entries across four continents, a Grammy for Best New Artist, and a Brit Award for British Album of the Year. The record’s success did not come from formula. It came from precision.

Production Architecture: Retro Reference Without Nostalgia Trap

The album was written and recorded in a grand house in East London transformed into a live-work studio across eight weeks between March and April 2025
— a concentrated, residential method that gives the record a feeling of shared air, the arrangements breathing with an intimacy that studio-booked sessions rarely produce.
Executive producer Julian Bunetta leads a lineup that includes Matt Hales, Bastian Langebæk, Leon Michels, Zach Nahome, John Ryan, Max Wolfgang, and Matt Zara, with Dean herself co-producing.
The division of labor is audible: Zach Nahome, who functions as the record’s primary sonic architect, imposes a smooth, almost surgical consistency across the record’s upper register — clean low-mids, restrained reverb tails, and vocal chains that keep Dean’s tone intimate without sacrificing projection.

The yearning “Man I Need” was co-written with Tobias Jesso Jr., while “Lady Lady” was co-produced with Leon Michels and Homer Steinweiss of The Dap-Kings.
That Dap-Kings connection is the record’s sharpest production statement: Michels and Steinweiss carry the grain of classic Atlantic Records rhythm sections — drummer-as-clock, horn punctuations as rhetorical italics — and Dean’s writing absorbs that language without quoting it directly.
Leon Michels, leader of the El Michels Affair and producer of Clairo’s Charm, features on the record, and his influence is keenly felt on the woozy late-album cut “A Couple Minutes.”
The track floats in a kind of amniotic low tempo, with fingerpicked guitar sitting just below the tonal center and a rhythm section so dry it sounds recorded in the same room as the listener.

Strings arranged by Rosie Danvers and Wired Strings add cinematic depth, while Simon Francis and Charlie Holmes provide the final polish through mastering and mixing.
The string work is applied sparingly — “Let Alone the One You Love” benefits from a two-bar cello line that appears only at the emotional peak — and Danvers’s restraint makes the moments where the orchestration opens up feel genuinely earned.
The album incorporates elements of pop, neo-soul, bossa nova, jazz pop, and Motown sound
, but none of these reference points are worn as cosplay. What Nahome and Dean engineer is an album where the retro sonics serve the emotional register rather than the other way around. The record’s tonal palette is warm but not muddy — a function of parallel compression decisions that preserve transient detail in the mid-range while keeping the low end clean and unhyped.

Songwriting and Vocal Presence: Diaristic Precision

Dean explained that the album title was inspired by American painter Mickalene Thomas’s art exhibition All About Love at The Broad in Los Angeles, California, which was itself a response to bell hooks’s books.
That literary-visual lineage is not incidental to how the songwriting operates. hooks’s work on love as an active, learned practice — not a passive feeling — permeates the record’s thematic architecture. Dean is not writing about love as event; she’s writing about it as behavior, as daily practice, as something that can be gotten wrong and corrected.

The album’s 12 tracks were written by Dean in collaboration with songwriters and producers including Julian Bunetta, Matt Hales, Leon Michels, John Ryan, Amy Allen, and Sir Nolan.
The co-writing credit with Amy Allen — one of contemporary pop’s most commercially fluent melodic architects — surfaces most clearly in the record’s hook structures: “Nice to Each Other” carries a chorus built on a falling fourth that resolves with enough inevitability to feel pre-linguistic, the kind of melodic logic that crosses demographic lines without dumbing itself down.
The piano ballad “Lady Lady” is written from the perspective of someone who has altered their personality to suit a partner, only to be left directionless when the relationship crumbles
— a psychological specificity that separates the track from the genre’s tendency toward relational abstraction.

In The Guardian, Alexis Petridis credited Dean for shedding the “neo-soul clichés” of her debut in favour of 1970s Los Angeles-inspired pop and soft rock, while praising her understated vocals and diaristic lyrics.
That phrase — diaristic — is the correct one. Dean is not confessional in the mode of high-octane self-exposure; her disclosures arrive quietly, embedded in well-turned phrases rather than announced through melodic climax. Her vocal approach consistently prioritizes texture over projection: she favors a mid-register chest tone with minimal falsetto reach, which keeps the emotional register conversational rather than theatrical.
Critics praised Dean’s voice as the centrepiece of the record — “crystalline, versatile and laced with warmth.”
The word “crystalline” is apt not because her voice has a glassy quality but because its internal structure is transparent: every decision about breath placement, phrasing duration, and dynamic shadow is audible and purposeful.

Emma Way of DIY noted that the album “is all of these lessons; from the need for independence (‘Man I Need’) to the art of letting go (‘Let Alone the One You Love’), Olivia manages to convey all wisely, without becoming preachy.”
That balance — between earned authority and open-ended inquiry — is what keeps the lyric sheet from curdling into self-help. Dean instructs nobody. She reports. The difference is everything.