Olivia Dean has mixed feelings about dating apps. “There’s lots of success stories. But what they do is inspire this culture of people being disposable,” the London soul singer says.
Apps encourage people to believe they have their pick of potential suitors, she believes. “There’s always a ‘next’. Which I guess maybe makes you less likely to invest in and work at love. And I do think that love is a practice, and something you can get good at, and that requires attention.”
The search for love in the digital hellscape of modern life is a topic that has occupied the thoughts of the 26-year-old as as her new single, Man I Need, streaks to the top of the charts, and as she prepares to release her brilliantly emotive second album, The Art of Loving.
Just like Dean, the LP wears its feelings on its sleeves: it’s a celebration of love in every sense: romantic, platonic, between friends, within families and even towards strangers with whom we share a common humanity.
RM Block
It was not so long ago that the idea of an album about love would have seemed cringy with bells on, the musical version of one of those giant Valentine’s Day balloons with a teddy bear suspended in the middle. Yet, as expressed by Dean, the concept of love is not a slurpy indulgence but a call to arms.
There is, she believes, a lot of hate in the world: pick up your phone and it comes spewing out. Dean would like to think she’s pushing back gently against the narrative that we’re all bound for Hades in a handcart.
“It breaks my heart,” she says of the negativity that is part of the background noise of 21st-century living. “I’m trying to get love back into the conversation.”
Dean gives the impression of taking success in her stride. She has certainly had a lot to celebrate: topping the charts in Ireland and New Zealand (her first number one), a sell-out 2026 arena tour and a deserved Mercury nomination for her debut album, Messy, from 2023.
Yet, for all her achievements, her career has in some ways been a struggle uphill. Raised in north London, the child of an English father and a Jamaican-Guyanese mother, she learned early in her career that the record industry had rigid expectations of the sort of music a woman of colour should make.
She was following her own path, drawing on her love of soul and jazz but also of alternative rock and singer-songwriter-style confessional ballads. This caused confusion among music’s executive class. Why wasn’t she making R&B music? Did it ever occur to her that she should be making R&B music?
“Sometimes people listen to music with their eyeballs rather than their ears,” she says. “It was quite limiting. Also, I don’t make R&B music. I don’t know why that’s so hard to grasp. I don’t even think about genre at all any more. I don’t feel bound by it. I feel I could make anything I wanted to and you’d just have to get your head around it.”
Dean persevered – and two years ago became an overnight success half a decade in the making with the release of the fantastic Messy. It was among the favourites for the Mercury prize, which ultimately went to the London jazz outfit Ezra Collective. Just as significantly, it shifted serious numbers: peaking at number four in the UK album charts, it confirmed the arrival of a new voice in British music.
Success has obviously brought added pressure. Dean has already sold out that upcoming arena tour, and people will be watching to see how the new album performs – and whether there is an audience for an LP about a topic as old-fashioned, and theoretically toe-curling, as love.
But when you drill down into it, of course, The Art of Loving isn’t gooey at all. Dean is single, and on the new record she asks whether she can expect and receive love in a non-romantic sense. Ultimately, what it’s about is finding meaning in your life while you are, in the dating sense at least, on your own.
Her conclusion is that you can and that, even if you’re not living a fairy-tale ending at this particular moment, you can still be happy and fulfilled. That generosity extends even to her exes as she observes on Nice to Each Other, her sharply observed but beautifully emotive single, where, against a soft jazz arrangement, she observes, “I don’t want a boyfriend … but we could be nice to each other.”
Her message is that love is a two-way street. One of the most basic human needs is to be loved. But are you ready to give that same love to others?
“When we’re younger we are maybe sold a lot of ideas about what love is. What it’s going to be for you. And I think we forget to think about the love that we have and how we can give to others,” she says.
“I’ve been thinking about this idea recently, about everybody waiting for this big love to happen to them, and fantasising about how they’re going to be loved. But then it’s, like, are you going to be that big love for somebody? Are you ready to give the love you feel you deserve?”
Dean isn’t sniffy about selling a lot of records. Her ultimate ambition, she says, is to headline Glastonbury. But she feels strongly that she should reach the top on her own terms; having once recorded a song that she felt didn’t fit with her, she is determined to follow her own path.
That means she’s prepared to dig her heels in. For the new LP, for instance, she decided to set up camp in a home studio in east London, where she could cocoon herself in a feeling of warmth and security. The goal, she says, was to live the message of the album: to feel safe and loved as she was singing about feeling safe and loved.
“I was thinking a lot about my comfort zone,” she says. “And you know how people are, like, ‘You should push yourself out of your comfort zone’? I tried that. I didn’t like it. Why can’t I be comfortable? Why do I have to be in distress to make good music? Why can’t I just be happy? So I tried to create the best environment for myself to work in, and it went great.”
Growing up, Dean had no direct experience of the music business. Her parents gave her the middle name Lauryn, in honour of the Fugees singer Lauryn Hill, but that was as showbizzy as it got. Her mother was a barrister who later entered politics, becoming the first black deputy leader of the UK’s Women’s Equality Party. Her dad was a fan of Al Green and Carole King. Neither had any contacts in the industry.
“My parents were not musical or involved in the arts or any creative field,” she says. “I’ve just had a love for it that I’ve followed religiously and without question.”
Dean attended the Brit School, the south London hit factory that has produced Adele, Amy Winehouse, FKA Twigs, Raye and others. But she says people get the wrong end of the stick about the institution in Croydon. It isn’t glamorous, and it certainly doesn’t offer an easy passport to the big time.
For Dean, going to the Brit School meant a nearly two-hour commute across London. There was nothing starry about getting up before 6am to travel to the opposite side of the city.
“Some people have a real chip on their shoulder about it,” she says. “And I suppose I can understand it, but I could only describe it as a school that offered me the chance to study something I cared about. It was free. You audition to get in. You can study something that you love and have an alternative style of being taught and meet like-minded people. It’s an amazing place that is offering a different kind of education compared to a lot of other schools.”
The Art of Loving is a subtle and thought-provoking record that asks fans to lean in and to pay attention to what Dean is singing about. In a release schedule packed with noisy, demonstrative, “pick me” albums, that makes it a rarity. Listening to it is like enveloping yourself in a warm hug.
“I wanted for it feel warm and feel heard and understood. To inspire a loving feeling, that’s the point. I’m trying to bring up the conversation of love. It’s an important thing to talk about. We don’t put the importance on it that we should.”
The Art of Loving is released by Capitol Records
