Love is often painted as candlelit dinners and heartbreak ballads, but Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving reminds us that it also lingers in the little details. The Sunday morning coffees with friends, forgiving yourself after making mistakes, the quiet pride of growing into your true self, and the strength of letting go. Dean captures this wider spectrum of affection with tenderness and grace, sketching out what it means to love and be loved in every season of life.
The Art of Loving sees Dean refining her signature musical style: soulful vocals, melodic hooks, lush piano lines, smooth guitar riffs and bursts of brass that elevates each track. All of this without overshadowing her intimacy.
Now climbing the charts as one of the album’s standout tracks, “Man I Need” showcases Olivia Dean at her sharpest. Rather than following the usual script of a love song, she turns inward, asking not who she needs, but who she wants to become. The track blends playful confidence with emotional honesty. A soulful groove that carries an equally relatable and profound reflection. It is less about searching for someone to complete her and more about tending to the gaps within herself – a candid meditation on self-awareness and growth.
Two other standout tracks, “Loud” and “Baby Steps”, highlight Dean’s range and emotional depth. “Loud” begins in quiet simplicity; a gentle acoustic line that gradually unfurls into a lush orchestral crescendo. With Rosie Danvers’ strings soaring behind her, Dean delivers a sound so grand and refined it could easily have been the score to a Bond film. “Baby Steps,” by contrast, is a quiet gem. Dean turns inward, finding strength in the slow, uncertain process of rebuilding after heartbreak. The song captures the gentle reckoning that comes with standing on your own again – offering yourself the same patience and care you once sought from others. It is a tender anthem of self-love; proving that healing does not need to be loud in order to feel powerful.
As the album drifts from track to track, Dean balances emotional honesty with a quiet sophistication. Love, in her world, is never one-dimensional. It can be joyful, bruised, hopeful and uncertain. Her warmth is tinged with a sense of melancholy, giving the record a grounded honesty rather than creating an idealised notion. As she concedes in the opening track, her heartbreak “wasn’t all for nothing”, and that bittersweet acceptance becomes the heart of an album that transforms pain into something graceful.
Ultimately, The Art of Loving stands as a testament to the complexity of human connection. Dean’s work portrays love not as a singular event, but as a continuous practice of empathy and growth. Love is an art form shaped as much by solitude and friendship, as by romance itself.
