“I’ve done all the classic stuff,” Olivia Dean sings on “Nice to Each Other,” the lead single from her second album, The Art of Loving. And it certainly does seem that way—the rising British neo-soul star studied songwriting at London’s prestigious BRIT School, got her first gig as a backing vocalist for the chart-topping dance-pop group Rudimental, and, throughout the 2020s, has worked her way up the United Kingdom’s traditional ladder to stardom: BBC Introducing Artist of the Year, Glastonbury, Jools Holland. She cites Amy Winehouse and Carole King in interviews and has covered the Supremes and Nat King Cole. So I’ll respectfully disagree with Dean’s follow-up claim, that “all the classic stuff… it never works.” Arriving at the peak of her fame to date, The Art of Loving is a genuinely lovely collection of would-be classic pop songs, all variations on the titular theme. It moves with the timeless grace of some bygone, indeterminate era in music and celebrity, one that maybe never existed to begin with.
Prior to recording The Art of Loving, Dean had immersed herself—as many of her generation have and many more surely will—in bell hooks’ All About Love. “‘Gotta throw some paint,’ that’s what bell would say,” she sings on the album’s brief prelude. More precisely, Dean drew inspiration from an exhibition of the same name by the artist Mickalene Thomas, itself a response to hooks’ influential work of theory. Whereas Thomas’ paintings are elaborate and rhinestone-encrusted, The Art of Loving is filled with little marvels of economy. Dean and executive producer Zach Nahome borrow a spare set of bongos from a Laurel Canyon open mic, a buttery Brill Building Rhodes organ, and some well-placed bah-bah-bahs courtesy of Motown girl-groups. In their fastidious arrangements, little details that might otherwise go unnoticed—a five-note, hyaline piano motif on “Nice to Each Other” or the passage of double-time horns that follow the first chorus of “Let Alone the One You Love”—instead become focal points.
That these songs don’t end up sounding vacuum-sealed is credit to Dean’s unfussy warmth. Given 12 hours, a tree might unfurl its leaves towards the glow of her voice, which, compared to her contemporaries, is neither as brashly operatic as RAYE’s nor as steely as Jorja Smith’s. “I’m the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life,” Dean proclaims on “So Easy (To Fall in Love)”: “Anyone with a heart would agree.” If anything, she strikes that balance a little too well; parts of The Art of Loving play like background music for the grander emotional beats elsewhere on the album. “So Easy” could stand in for the bossa nova record Dean mentions on “Man I Need,” whose 12/8 rhythm keeps time with the spring in your step after a great first date. Of course, the right accompaniment can transform a daily routine into something sublime, and The Art of Loving is, in all sincerity, a perfect album to cook or clean to.
Dean presents as thoughtful about the limits of her tableau vivant approach to music. The videos for “Nice to Each Other” and “Man I Need” both take place on what are very obviously soundstages, a nod to the silver-screen artifice inherent to the tradition she’s working in. Dean’s writing can be bracingly incisive: In two lines (“I don’t know where the switches are/Or where you keep the cutlery”) she captures the unease of an old flame rendered newly unfamiliar. Too often, though, it’s weighed down with clichés and mixed metaphors, and both “Close Up” and “Baby Steps” cross the line from charmingly retro into pastiche. The Art of Loving reminds me of Leslie Feist’s exemplary pivot to coffeeshop pop and lounge jazz on her albums Let It Die and The Reminder, but Feist also had her wild youth as a Broken Social Scenester behind her by then. Dean’s meticulous replicas are nearly impeccable; it’s high time she starts throwing some paint around.
