“I’ve done all the classic stuff,” Olivia Dean sings on “Nice to Each Other,” the opening track of her second album, The Art of Loving. It’s hard to argue with her. The British neo-soul singer has followed the playbook almost perfectly: a BRIT School education, an early stint as a backing vocalist for Rudimental, steady acclaim throughout the 2020s—BBC Introducing Artist of the Year, Glastonbury, Later… with Jools Holland. She reveres Amy Winehouse and Carole King, covers the Supremes and Nat King Cole, and sings with the unflappable poise of someone raised on vinyl and BBC Radio 2. When she claims that “all the classic stuff… it never works,” you can’t help but smile, because her own record proves otherwise. The Art of Loving is a graceful, radiant collection of classic pop songs—each one orbiting around its central theme with the ease of something timeless, or perhaps a dream of timelessness that never truly existed.
Before making the album, Dean immersed herself in bell hooks’ All About Love, a text that has quietly reshaped how a generation of young artists think about intimacy and selfhood. On the album’s brief prelude, she sings, “Gotta throw some paint, that’s what bell would say,” quoting hooks by way of painter Mickalene Thomas, whose exhibition The Art of Loving inspired the album’s title. Where Thomas’ canvases are dazzlingly ornate—layered with rhinestones, textures, and color—Dean’s art is one of restraint. Working with executive producer Zach Nahome, she builds small, exquisite pop sculptures: a Rhodes organ gleaming like butter in the sun, a few soft bongos borrowed from Laurel Canyon, a Motown chorus of “bah-bah-bahs” that glint and fade.
Every detail is carefully placed, but nothing feels sterile. In “Nice to Each Other,” a five-note piano phrase hangs like a question in the air; in “Let Alone the One You Love,” a burst of horns blooms unexpectedly after the first chorus, as though the song itself were exhaling. Dean’s music is built on these kinds of gestures—quiet but deliberate movements that draw you in rather than show off. Much of that warmth comes from her voice: rich, tender, unforced. It lacks the operatic flair of RAYE or the cool precision of Jorja Smith, but that’s her advantage. “I’m the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life,” she sings on “So Easy (To Fall in Love),” and she’s right. Her songs inhabit that glowing in-between—romantic but grounded, nostalgic yet distinctly modern.
Sometimes, though, that perfection works against her. For all its polish, The Art of Loving can drift into the background like an especially tasteful playlist. “So Easy” feels tailor-made for a dinner party, and “Man I Need” evokes the soft shuffle of bossa nova without fully surrendering to it. There’s a comfort to that—this is, without irony, a lovely record to cook or clean to—but it leaves you wanting a bit more friction, more risk, more of the mess that true love (and great pop) often demands.
Dean seems aware of this tension. The music videos for “Nice to Each Other” and “Man I Need” unfold on visible soundstages, as if to acknowledge the theatricality of her project—the way she stages emotion within the carefully lit confines of retro glamour. Her lyrics, too, can flash with sudden clarity. “I don’t know where the switches are / Or where you keep the cutlery,” she sings to an old lover, distilling post-breakup estrangement into the simplest domestic image imaginable. But elsewhere, she leans too heavily on familiar tropes. “Close Up” and “Baby Steps” tip from homage into imitation, their charm suffocated by vintage affectation.
At its best, The Art of Loving recalls Feist’s early-2000s shift toward lounge-pop elegance on Let It Die and The Reminder—music that made introspection sound effortless. But Feist’s composure was earned through years of creative chaos; Dean, by contrast, feels almost too composed, her immaculate craft verging on museum-quality preservation. You can admire the brushwork, but you start to crave the spatter, the boldness, the mistake.
Olivia Dean has mastered the “classic stuff.” Now it’s time for her to break it open—to throw some paint, as bell hooks might say, and let the color spill.
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