Day 141: Olivia Dean – The Art of Loving
How can I start this without sounding geriatric? Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I know this artist is big among the youths on TikTok, but I’m somewhat unaware of her, aside from hearing snippets from her songs here and there. So much (maybe too much) of this project focuses on older artists, so I thought I’d go for a big current artist for a change.
Album cover courtesy of Capitol and Polydor
My expectations weren’t particularly high today. I’m such a neo-luddite that I’m prejudiced against artists whose main propeller to fame has been 15-second clips online, I just assume that their full-length songs aren’t that good. And based on the clips I’d heard, I thought Olivia Dean was one of the driving forces behind the Gen Z resurgence of what I’d like to call rom-com music – simple, emotional pop songs made to play in the background when [character] falls in love with [other character] in [insert film]. And the youths seem to love it — the children yearn for Norah Jones and “Suddenly I See”.
Olivia Dean cropped up seemingly out of nowhere from the depths of the algorithm, but obviously that’s not what actually happened. She’s been working away for years now, having been nominated for Amazon Music’s Breakthrough Artist in 2021 and BBC Introducing’s Artist of the Year in 2023. Her debut album Messy came out in 2023 to mainly positive reviews, and her sophomore record The Art of Loving came out in September this year.
Having listened to the full album, I don’t think that the rom com-label is too unfair of an assessment. All of it feels a bit like a novel version of middle-of-the-road generic early 2000s pop with a neo-soul slant, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing: there’s a reason why the easy listening artists were so popular in the noughts, and that is that music like this is pretty much the auditory equivalent of soup – it’s not the most exciting thing, but it is always at the very least somewhat good, it’s simple but it scratches an itch.
Olivia Dean’s continued success signals the return of adult contemporary, and I guess in these horrific times, it makes sense that the music of choice is semi-cheesy comfort-driven rom-com tunes. Songs like “Man I Need” and “So Easy (To Fall in Love)” are maybe not the most inventive things you’ve heard, but they’re charming in a way that feels a bit like a comfort blanket taking you back to the halcyon days of girly-pop films of the early ‘00s. I feel like she really hammered home the throwback chick flick thing when she made a song for a Bridget Jones movie, which is about the most early 2000-vibed thing you as an artist could possibly do.
I don’t hate it, I don’t love it – it feels like decent music to put on while you’re doing chores without having to think about it, or maybe something you’d hear in a shop, but that’s about it for me. She’s got the chops to do more exciting things, which I’m sure she’ll get to – she’s still young. 7/10.