{"id":253669,"date":"2025-09-25T13:18:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T13:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/253669\/"},"modified":"2025-09-25T13:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T13:18:10","slug":"olivia-dean-the-art-of-loving-review-british-pops-biggest-new-star-sheds-the-neo-soul-cliches-to-really-shine-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/253669\/","title":{"rendered":"Olivia Dean: The Art of Loving review \u2013 British pop\u2019s biggest new star sheds the neo-soul cliches to really shine | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have been paying any attention to the UK singles chart recently, it can hardly have escaped your notice that for the last couple of months it has been utterly dominated by the soundtrack for the Netflix smash KPop Demon Hunters<\/a>. At the time of writing, Golden, by the cartoon\u2019s chief protagonists Huntr\/x, is enjoying its seventh week at No 1: a couple of weeks back, songs from the film would have occupied seven places in the Top 10 had chart rules not limited artists to three appearances in the Top 40.<\/p>\n

Olivia Dean: The Art of Loving.<\/p>\n

The most striking challenge to its supremacy has been mounted by London singer-songwriter Olivia Dean. Her single Man I Need has been dug in at No 2 for the last month and has been joined in the Top 10 by its predecessor, Nice to Each Other<\/a>, and her collaboration with Sam Fender, Rein Me In<\/a>. Further down the Top 20, her old single Dive is enjoying an unexpected new lease of life. Were it not for a made-up K-pop band, one suspects we\u2019d be talking about Dean\u2019s ongoing success as the pop phenomenon of the moment, and not just in the UK: Man I Need is the fifth most played song in the world on Spotify at the time of writing.<\/p>\n

Dean\u2019s 2023 debut album, Messy<\/a>, attracted respectful but mixed reviews and did respectable, rather than remarkable, business. It spawned a hit single in Dive<\/a>, but seemed very much standard-issue stuff \u2013 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\u2019s Hootenanny belting out You Can\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 (\u00a374m) smash-hit animation, the soundtrack of which has topped the charts in 16 countries.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Olivia Dean: Man I Need \u2013 video<\/p>\n

So how has it happened? High-profile support slots on Sam Fender and Sabrina Carpenter\u2019s 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\u2019t describe it as a complete reinvention, it certainly constitutes a noticeable rethink. It expunges most of the cliches of Dean\u2019s debut album \u2013 or rather quarantines them on a track called Close Up \u2013 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 \u2013 you\u2019re never far from a sun-dappled electric piano line or a breezy acoustic guitar; Baby Steps offers up slick, yacht rock-y funk \u2013 and, on So Easy (To Fall in Love), Carpenters-style MOR pop that would once have been considered entirely beyond the pale.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sound that\u2019s familiar without feeling hackneyed or self-consciously retro: Something Inbetween is powered by a muffled rhythm that sounds like someone playing a techstep drum\u2019n\u2019bass track with a duvet over the speakers; lurking in the depths of Nice to Each Other there\u2019s a wash of shoegaze-y guitar noise and gusts of ambient synth drone. Airy and inviting, it suits Dean\u2019s sweetly understated vocals \u2013 mercifully lacking affectation, either of the post-Winehouse \u201cjazzy\u201d variety or the weird, consonant-mangling \u201cindie voice\u201d that\u2019s supposed to connote intimacy in 21st-century pop \u2013 and adds a cinematic gloss to her lyrics. Dean is big on diaristic detail as she navigates ex-related angst and tentative new relationships: \u201cI don\u2019t know where the switches are, or where you keep your cutlery.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Perhaps more importantly, Dean and her co-authors \u2013 including Tobias Jesso Jr, and Matt Hales, who once plied his trade as singer-songwriter Aqualung \u2013 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\u2019ve Seen It sound as effortlessly charming as they do.<\/p>\n

So the album breezes past. It\u2019s exceptionally well made but feels entirely natural; it\u2019s mainstream commercial pop, but laudably devoid of obvious cliches. If Dean\u2019s 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\u2019 upper echelons is proof that pop in 2025 is a business you can\u2019t really predict, but still, The Art of Loving\u2019s success seems a foregone conclusion.<\/p>\n

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