FEATURE:
The Best Albums of 2025
Olivia Dean – The Art of Loving
__________
I am nearly through…
PHOTO CREDIT: Lola Mansell
this series, where I highlight the best albums of the year. Not just those that have been acclaimed by critics, but ones that I really love. Released on 26th September, Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving is such a beautiful and phenomenal album. There was a lot of love for it. I am going to finish with a review for The Art of Loving. However, before getting there, there are some reviews with Olivia Dean that I want to get to. I am going to bring three interviews together. I am starting out with Vogue and their conversation. Speaking with an artist ready to take centre stage, Dean discussed, among other things, the inspirations behind her second album. I really love 2023’s Messy, though I feel The Art of Loving is Dean is her greatest work to date:
“Vogue: The Art of Loving is your second studio album, and you’ve said it’s lighter and more fun than your debut album, Messy. Can you describe how your headspace changed from one album to the next?
Olivia Dean: I think generally, as a person, I’m more centered and in touch with myself than I was two years ago. This album, I would like to think, has an emotional maturity that I’ve really been working on developing in myself. I would never claim to know it all. I’m not saying I know everything about love, guys. I’m trying to work on myself and learn and be a better person, and I think that was all through writing these songs. So yeah, I think I’m just older—and hopefully a little bit wiser.
And what were some of your inspirations for this album?
Bottom of Form
So many. I’m somebody that is such a sponge for things. I love art in many different forms. I was listening to a lot of vinyl and crate-digging, and listening to a lot of Brazilian music. There’s also always a lot of reggae music, and I listen to a lot of Ethiopian music and Fleetwood Mac. I really also got into more guitar-y music. There’s a singer I love called Alice Phoebe Lou—I’m always listening to her. I love her lyrics and the spirituality and emotional intelligence in her writing.
I was also going to a lot of exhibitions. I went to this exhibition called All About Love in LA, actually, which inspired the kind of theme for the album, and this amazing Brazilian modernism exhibition in London where I saw this specific painting. I took all the colors from that painting for the color palette for the vinyl.
I love that. And do you plan on staying in London, or do you want to eventually settle somewhere else?
It’s really interesting you asked that. I was actually having that conversation yesterday and talking about all the things I’d love to do with my life. London is somewhere that is so important to me and where all my friends and my family are, but I see myself in New York, maybe, for a period of time. I feel like New York is my vibe. I want that Sex and the City life. So maybe—we’ll see”.
I am moving to Rolling Stone UK and their talk with Olivia Dean. Discussing spirituality, and why love is the core and main theme of her second studio album, to “the frivolous fun of dressing up”, this is one of her best artists. Someone I am so fascinated in. Seeing where her career will take her:
“Olivia Dean grew up in Highams Park, a quiet, leafy suburb teetering on the outer edges of the capital, and right on the cusp of Essex. As a kid, she threw herself into everything from karate to musical theatre with varying levels of success: “I didn’t get very far,” she says, of the former. “Please do not quote me as saying I’m a black belt in karate.” Eventually, her mum Christine Dean (a former deputy leader of the now-defunct Women’s Equality Party) intervened. “She was like, ‘Pack it in, babe, choose a hobby — you’re doing too much,’” Dean laughs.
It was music, and the inherent sense of storytelling and drama in musical theatre, that immediately won out. Though she had always felt “a little bit like the odd one out” growing up, getting a place at BRIT School opened up a whole new world, and introduced Dean to like-minded mates in the process, some of whom she still works with today. As a sidenote, it was also one hell of a commute from Waltham Forest to Croydon. “An hour and 45,” she groans. “I would leave, and it would still be pretty dark in the winter, and dark again when I came back — it was quite a commitment.”
While she was studying there, her teacher Mr Doherty showed a 17-year-old Dean live footage of Paul Simon performing ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ and “it just sparked something in me. I loved the coming together of the quite traditional singer-songwriter thing that Paul Simon does so well, with this South African music, and the players, and the brass, and I just remember thinking: ‘Oh, I’d love to do that. How could I do that?’ For want of a better phrase, it was a kick up the arse.”
Shortly after this, upon graduating, Dean met her manager, who was also working with Rudimental, and when the chance to join the group on the road as a backing singer arose, she went for it. “What were the chances: you get the opportunity to play in front of those big crowds, but it’s not about you — you can learn and take that feeling in, without the pressure,” she remembers.
“That was an invaluable experience for me, but it also definitely inspired me to go: ‘OK, could I do this myself? I think I’ve got some stuff that I’d like to say…’ I’m a real observer, I think, and I like to learn, and then apply,” she says, “without sounding too clinical about it.”
Asimilarly thoughtful approach has also shaped The Art of Loving. Following the huge success of Messy, Dean was feeling daunted by the idea of diving into its follow-up. “I had developed a bit of studio anxiety, I suppose, and was putting a lot of pressure on myself,” she explains. “I realised that all this time that I’ve been making music, I’ve never had my own studio. I’ve always been coming into other people’s spaces and trying to justify myself. And so I thought that I’d love to build my own space and create within it.”
Though Dean spent a couple of weeks working on the record in LA, and also recorded at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, much of it was made in London, where she decided to take a much more homely approach this time around. After converting an east London house into her own studio, she moved in, along with her piano from home, and lived there pretty much full-time throughout the creation of the album, which is produced by Zach Nahome, and features Max Wolfgang, Bastian Langebæk and Tobias Jesso Jr. as collaborators.
“I brought photos from my house, and I slept there. I would have friends round, outside of studio time, and I had parties there, so it was this real, living, breathing space. I was really deep in it, and maybe sometimes too deep in it,” she laughs. “Sometimes I was like, ‘Maybe I need to go home-home this weekend, and then listen again with fresh ears.’”
The initial title and overarching theme for the album came to Dean last year, after she saw an exhibition by the American visual artist Mickalene Thomas — known for her brightly patterned, rhinestone-peppered collages of African-American women — at The Broad in LA. “It’s in response to bell hooks’ [book] All About Love, which I’m a huge fan of. There’s this passage in the book about the craft of loving one’s own life, and I thought, ‘I think I’m gonna call this album The Art of Loving.’”
“Love is something I have always been interested in,” she continues. “For some reason, it’s seen as this mystical, untouchable thing that we’re all supposed to just have a go at and figure out. In All About Love, bell hooks is like, imagine if we had a class in primary school that was, like, emotional studies? So that we could teach each other a bit of etiquette, and how to fill each other with care? I just wanted to do a deep-dive on love, to understand why I love the way that I do, and how I love other people.”
Filled with warmth and joy, The Art of Loving is a continuation of Messy’s eclectic sound — and also shares the blurred aesthetic of her debut’s cover art. “It’s representative of imperfection,” she says. “Some of the stuff I’m speaking about isn’t fact, or always the truth — it’s just my truth. I kind of want people to hear their own truth,” she says. “So I don’t need you to have a big fat picture of my face when you’re listening to it!”.
The final interview is from W Magazine. Olivia Dean, so much more than a viral singer or someone who made a hit or two, is this genuinely wonderful artist who you can see growing between albums. When critics decide their favourite albums of the year, The Art of Loving will feature on most of them:
“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 mindset. 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”.
I’ll end with a review for The Art of Loving. The Guardian were among those who reviewed The Art of Loving. Perhaps more ambitious, assured, distinct and personal than Messy, The Art of Loving, I feel, is going to scoop awards and will definitely give Olivia Dean so much inspiration and push when it comes to a third album. That might not happen for a couple of years. She has some incredible dates booked for next year across the U.K. and Europe:
“Dean’s 2023 debut album, Messy, attracted respectful but mixed reviews and did respectable, rather than remarkable, business. It spawned a hit single in Dive, but seemed very much standard-issue stuff – tasteful neo-soul replete with vintage horn arrangements, ballads accompanied by lo-fi, slightly out-of-tune piano, tracks that opened with the sound of crackly old vinyl. Its author did the type of things that tasteful British neo-soul artists do: appearing on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny belting out You Can’t Hurry Love, covering The Christmas Song as part of a seasonal Amazon campaign, turning up on the soundtrack for the new Bridget Jones film alongside Jamie Cullum and George Ezra. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of that, but nor did any of it suggest that Dean was the kind of artist built to contest the dominance of a $100m (£74m) smash-hit animation, the soundtrack of which has topped the charts in 16 countries.
So how has it happened? High-profile support slots on Sam Fender and Sabrina Carpenter’s stadium shows early in the summer probably helped broaden her audience, but the real answer seems to lie on The Art of Loving. While you wouldn’t describe it as a complete reinvention, it certainly constitutes a noticeable rethink. It expunges most of the cliches of Dean’s debut album – or rather quarantines them on a track called Close Up – and instead looks for inspiration to music that emanated from recording studios in 70s LA. The Art of Loving dabbles in both Rumours-adjacent soft rock – you’re never far from a sun-dappled electric piano line or a breezy acoustic guitar; Baby Steps offers up slick, yacht rock-y funk – and, on So Easy (To Fall in Love), Carpenters-style MOR pop that would once have been considered entirely beyond the pale.
It’s a sound that’s familiar without feeling hackneyed or self-consciously retro: Something Inbetween is powered by a muffled rhythm that sounds like someone playing a techstep drum’n’bass track with a duvet over the speakers; lurking in the depths of Nice to Each Other there’s a wash of shoegaze-y guitar noise and gusts of ambient synth drone. Airy and inviting, it suits Dean’s sweetly understated vocals – mercifully lacking affectation, either of the post-Winehouse “jazzy” variety or the weird, consonant-mangling “indie voice” that’s supposed to connote intimacy in 21st-century pop – and adds a cinematic gloss to her lyrics. Dean is big on diaristic detail as she navigates ex-related angst and tentative new relationships: “I don’t know where the switches are, or where you keep your cutlery.”
Perhaps more importantly, Dean and her co-authors – including Tobias Jesso Jr, and Matt Hales, who once plied his trade as singer-songwriter Aqualung – have significantly upped their game. Every chorus has been polished until it catches the light (Baby Steps offers a particularly gleaming example), while one suspects that an enormous amount of effort has been expended on making the melodies of Nice to Each Other and I’ve Seen It sound as effortlessly charming as they do.
So the album breezes past. It’s exceptionally well made but feels entirely natural; it’s mainstream commercial pop, but laudably devoid of obvious cliches. If Dean’s debut seemed like an artist trying to find their place in the landscape by ticking relevant boxes, The Art of Loving seems like someone finding their own voice. The sight of Olivia Dean battling a cartoon K-pop band in the charts’ upper echelons is proof that pop in 2025 is a business you can’t really predict, but still, The Art of Loving’s success seems a foregone conclusion”.
A stunning album from Olivia Dean, it is definitely one of my favourites of the year. I do feel 2026 will be the most important years of her career. In terms of where she plays. In terms of her personal life, maybe a move to News York will come about. It is very exciting to consider…
WHAT will come.