Hard work, romance and bell hooks: How Olivia Deen became Britain’s newest pop star | Olivia Dean

SToday’s Brit Awards will include performances from big-name singers such as Harry Styles and Mark Ronson – but all eyes will be on Olivia Dean, the Londoner who has become one of the UK’s biggest breakout artists in years, thanks to her second album The Art of Loving and her UK No. 1 hit single. This year’s ceremony, which has been nominated for five awards, is likely to be a coronation for Dean, who has achieved global success on a scale that most contemporary British artists struggle to achieve.

Focusing on love in all its permutations, The Art of Loving applies meditations on friendship and romance to a light and gauzy mix of bossa nova, old-school R&B and indie pop. Dean delivers each song with an understated verve—somehow capturing Diana Ross’s otherworldly poise and the charm of your best friend killing it at karaoke—and becomes the voice of a generation whose romantic lives have been complicated by dating apps and other digital mating rituals.

Her rise has been a blink and you’ll miss it: her Mercury-nominated debut Chaos, from 2023, peaked in the top five in the UK charts and received widespread acclaim, but made little impact in the US; A year ago, her name wasn’t as household as it is now. But over the past few months, the 26-year-old British School graduate has made her way into the pop firmament: The Art of Loving debuted at No. 1 in the UK upon its release in September 2025 — the first recording by a British solo artist to do so since Adele, who debuted at No. 1 in 2021 with her 30th album — and No. 8 on the US Billboard chart.

In the following weeks, Dean launched an old-fashioned charm offensive, performing Jools Holland’s Man I Need Everywhere on Saturday Night Live and winning over audiences as a support act on Sabrina Carpenter’s blockbuster Short N Sweet tour, which included five dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden. By mid-January of this year, “The Art of Loving” had risen to the top of the chart at No. 3 in the US, while “Man I Need” had risen from its 82nd US chart debut into the top ten.

A few weeks later, she took home the Grammy Award for Best New Artist — a highly prestigious award won in recent years by Chappelle Rowan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish — and received further plaudits for an acceptance speech she gave in celebration of the cultural enrichment created by immigration (“I am a product of courage, and I think these people deserve to be celebrated,” she said, referring to her grandmother, who immigrated from Guyana to the UK as part of the Windrush generation in the mid-century). Later this year, Dean will play a four-night headlining show at Madison Square Garden, which sold out in seconds when it went on sale last year.

Joe Charrington, head of Dean’s Capitol Records UK label, says Dean is “super determined about the kind of records she wants to make – and that’s not common”. Some of the artists she works with have an unfocused process, Charrington says, and “they’ll want to write 200 songs, and we’ll get 10. For Olivia, once she has an idea of ​​the record she wants to make, she’ll say, ‘This is the time frame I want to do it in, let’s do it.’ And you just believe her — it’s real confidence.”

Dean grew up in Highams Park, east London, in a musical family which she said sparked her love of writing and performing. At the age of 15, she was accepted into the British School, the prestigious performing arts academy attended by Adele and Amy Winehouse, among others. Rachel Chinoriri, Dean’s classmate at Dean’s British School, and a successful musician in her own right, says she admires that Dean’s music is “an extension of her,” adding that Dean herself “is such a light. You can tell she really wants the best for herself and extends that to everyone around her.”

Deen began releasing music at the age of 19, in 2018, and released “Messy” in 2023, after spending the pandemic years building a dedicated fan base on social media. Messy was a huge hit for her first album, but Charrington says Dean focused on her follow-up only a short time later, and Chinoriri points out: “Even though her music has changed, in a way, the line is still the same.”

Aside from Man I Need, several other songs have resonated: this week, she and Sam Fender took the top spot for a second week with their collaboration Rein Me In – after a historic 35-week rise to the top – and Dean also took second place with So Easy (To Fall in Love).

Dean is “intentional in everything she does,” says Willem Ward, the Capitol A&R dean who chose to work with him on The Art of Loving. While writing The Art of Love, he says, “She was reading books by the author [authors such as] “Bell hooks, which was very helpful for her. The first thing she said was, ‘Sometimes, ‘Get out of your comfort zone’ is confusing to me, because I really want to be in my comfort zone,” he says.

So, instead of recording a pop song in Los Angeles, as many musicians do, Dean moved to a house in Hackney, east London, where she turned her label into a studio, working with a group of producers including Matt Hills and Zak Nahome, with whom she felt more comfortable. “When you write, it’s personal stories,” Ward says. “She wanted to be somewhere physically and with people [she knew]This allowed her to take advantage of it.

Singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., who co-wrote “A Man I Need” with Dean, told me that she “got it all — and was a pleasure to work with. She was very sure of what she liked and didn’t like, which made the process very easy for both of us. I left those sessions and called my manager and said, ‘She’s amazing, her album is going to kill her.'”

Jisoo’s predictions came true: The Art of Loving has sold 430,000 copies in the UK alone, which is a huge number for any artist, let alone one so young. That’s due in large part to Man I Need, which is filled with the light that Chinouriri mentioned, evidenced by Dean’s knockout performance of the song on SNL and at the Grammys. Charrington believes the song is “relatable and resonates with people at a time when they need to have some fun,” before adding: “And it takes a lot of hard work. I will say: it works.” It’s bloody hard“.