“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.
