REVIEW: Olivia Dean - The Art of Loving

If you have been listening to Olivia Dean for as long as I have, you will agree with me when I say that love, for Olivia Dean, has never been a static emotion. It’s an ongoing practice — imperfect, patient, and deeply human.

Her sophomore album, The Art of Loving, arrives steady and plain-spoken: not a manifesto but a lived set of instructions. Coming after Messy, it feels less like a correction and more like a refinement, the appetite for intimacy still there, only now the sentences are shorter, the edits cleaner. Instead of grand gestures, Olivia Dean offers us lived moments: the way someone cups a kettle, the small apology left in a voice note, the way you teach yourself to ask when you need to be seen. The album’s arc moves us from falling, to testing, to recognition — and in that arc it teaches an ethic as much as it tells a story.

bell hooks argues that love is an action: “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way… to assume accountability and responsibility.” That sentence is a good shorthand for what Olivia Dean is trying to do here: translate the idea that love must be chosen and practised into songs that feel like real lessons, not slogans. Even at her most tender, she refuses sentimentality; she is more interested in the small, repeatable acts that make love durable.

The album opens like a taking of breath — an intro that says, in effect, we’re about to learn this together. From there, the songs read as exercises. For example,   “So Easy (To Fall in Love)” is not a careless celebration of first-glow; it is an admission that falling is the simplest part, “so easy to fall,” and what follows — maintenance, repair, clarity — is the real work. The lyric pull is light and luminous: “I'm the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life / Anyone with a heart would agree: It's so easy to fall in love with me” It works as both flirt and caution: yes, the chemistry is immediate, but kindness and asking remain the curriculum.

That teaching (or instruction) becomes insistence on the album’s biggest and most public moment: “Man I Need.” The song has become a shorthand in the press and on playlists for what Olivia Dean does best — she makes the act of requesting feel like moral clarity. “Talk to me, talk to me” she repeats with modest force, turning a simple conversational ask into ethical practice. The lyric “come be the man I need” reads like a lesson in boundary and mutual labour — it is not complaint; it is instruction. There’s tenderness in the bluntness — to ask plainly is to refuse the romance of suffering. The single’s strength is that the work of love is not only in the feeling but in the request, the reply, and the follow-through. There’s a civic quality to it; the lyric makes tenderness a public practice.

Elsewhere, tenderness is taught by holding pain without weaponising it. In “Loud,” when she murmurs that “everything's unspoken now / I'm out, the silence is so loud,” the line refracts the album’s quiet courage: noticing absence, naming it, refusing to let grief metastasize into blame. Olivia Dean’s voice doesn’t explode; it inhabits the silence and maps its contours. She confronts hurt without drama; she models repair rather than spectacle. If bell hooks asks us to be accountable to love, Olivia Dean gives us a map: name what you need, refuse to be made small, and show up for the practice even when it stings.

In my opinion, the UK has produced some of best R&B of the past few years. Put Olivia Dean beside Joy Crookes, Jorja Smith or Cleo Sol and you hear kinship: a British soul turned inward, intimate and literate. But Olivia Dean’s signature is economy. She trims the edges and lets space do the work. Her sonic gestures — a Motown-tinged string here, a warm electric piano there, a sunlit guitar figure — are archival and domestic at once. They root the songs in a remembered tenderness without making the record a retro sketch.

On tracks like “Nice to Each Other,” the production is deliberately modest: a repeating piano motif, close harmonies, a spare brass punctuation. The emotional content is where the risk lives. The lyric, “I’ve done all the classic stuff, and it never works” is refusal as enlightenment: she declines the scripts of romantic myth and asks instead for reciprocity and simple decency. Her music is part of a small but potent movement in UK soul that treats genre as a language, not a costume — using old forms to say new things about duty, care, and the politics of emotional labour. The result is music that feels plausible in a kitchen and persuasive in an arena.

What holds the album together is her eye for material detail. Her storytelling is precise: the tiny embarrassments, the careful returns, the middling days that become the architecture of a life. This is love as archive. She writes habits into melody, makes the listener a witness to habit as devotion. In “Baby Steps,” she takes a whole strategy and phrases it simply: progress in “baby steps.” That phrase isn’t sentiment; it is method, a rehearsal for gentleness. She teaches us how incremental change looks and sounds.

Mid-record, “Let Alone the One You Love” interrogates a darker dynamic: what happens when intimacy becomes a tool for belittlement. The song’s movement is less about accusation than reclamation. She refuses diminishment: the lyric “And, if you knew me at all / You wouldn't try to keep me small / Who would do that to a friend, let alone the one you love?” functions as a thesis statement for the album’s insistence on maintaining selfhood inside relationship.

The closer, “I’ve Seen It,” pulls back from the romantic microscope and addresses love itself. It stands as the album’s testimony. The track reads like a field report: she catalogues where love shows up — on buses, in kitchens, in small offerings — and then bends inward to recognize it in herself. Where earlier tracks ask for showings, the closer reveals the showing already happened — in long afternoons, in repeated small mercies. “I know it’s somewhere in my chest,” she sings, then lets the realization land: love is not only sought; it is also remembered and found. That revelation reframes the whole album: the student becomes a witness to where care has already been planted. The narrative has shifted from need to recognition; from invitation to return.

That pivot matters. The album’s moral arc — fall, ask, test, recognize — ends with a subtle instruction: you cannot reliably give what you cannot locate in yourself. She refuses the simple romantic mythology that frames love as an external trophy. Instead, she teaches vocational love: work, boundaries, repair, memory.

The album’s commitment to clarity, its soft restraint, and its assertion that asking is an ethical act already feels like a corrective to certain pop habits of dramatizing pain without offering tools for repair.

The Art of Loving is a living primer. Olivia Dean teaches by example: how to ask, how to return, how to hold another without erasing your edges. bell hooks tells us, in a line that sits well beside this record, that we must “think of love as an action rather than a feeling.” Olivia Dean writes the how-to songs for that statement; she hands us small practices of tenderness and asks us to try them on in our ordinary lives.

The album’s movement — from falling to asking to recognition in “I’ve Seen It” — tracks a moral education. It is not tidy or moralising. It is a set of instructions, a set of failures and returns, and finally a gentle claim: love is not a prize you win, nor is it a wound you must endure for meaning. It is a craft you practice, imperfectly, with others and with yourself.