{"id":307084,"date":"2026-02-28T21:59:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T21:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/307084\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T21:59:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T21:59:12","slug":"hard-work-romance-and-bell-hooks-how-olivia-dean-became-british-pops-newest-megastar-olivia-dean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/307084\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard work, romance and bell hooks: how Olivia Dean became British pop\u2019s newest megastar | Olivia Dean"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saturday\u2019s Brit awards will feature performances from heavy hitters such as Harry Styles and Mark Ronson \u2013 but all eyes will be on Olivia Dean, the Londoner who has become one of the UK\u2019s biggest breakouts in years, thanks to her second album The Art of Loving<\/a> and its mega-smash UK No 1 single Man I Need. Nominated for five awards, this year\u2019s ceremony is likely to serve as a coronation for Dean, who has found international success on a scale that most contemporary British artists struggle to achieve.<\/p>\n

The Art of Loving focuses on love in all its permutations, applying meditations on friendship and romance to a light, gauzy blend of bossa nova, throwback R&B and indie-pop. Dean delivers each song with unfussy exuberance \u2013 she somehow captures both the otherworldly poise of Diana Ross and the charm of your best friend killing it at karaoke \u2013 and has become the voice of a generation whose romantic lives have been complicated by dating apps and other digitally mediated mating rituals.<\/p>\n

Her rise has been a blink-and-you\u2019ll-miss-it affair: her Mercury-nominated debut Messy, from 2023, peaked in the Top 5 of the UK charts and received widespread acclaim, but didn\u2019t make significant impact in the US; a year ago, she was hardly the household name she is now. But over the past few months, the 26-year-old graduate of the Brit school has chiselled her way into the pop firmament: The Art of Loving debuted at No 1 in the UK on its release in September 2025 \u2013 the first record by a British female solo artist to do so since Adele, who debuted at No 1 in 2021 with her album 30 \u2013 and No 8 on the US Billboard chart.<\/p>\n

In the following weeks, Dean mounted an old-fashioned charm offensive, performing Man I Need everywhere from Jools Holland to Saturday Night Live and winning over audiences as a support act on Sabrina Carpenter\u2019s blockbuster Short N Sweet tour, which included five dates at New York\u2019s Madison Square Garden. By mid-January this year, The Art of Loving had risen to a chart peak of No 3 in the US, while Man I Need had climbed from its No 82 US chart debut to the Top 10.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, she snagged the Grammy for best new artist \u2013 a hugely prestigious award won in recent years by Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish \u2013 and won further plaudits for an acceptance speech celebrating the cultural enrichment created by immigration (\u201cI\u2019m a product of bravery, and I think those people deserve to be celebrated,\u201d she said, referring to her grandmother who emigrated from Guyana to the UK as part of the mid-century Windrush generation). Later this year, Dean will play her own four-night headline run at Madison Square Garden, which sold out in seconds upon going on sale last year.<\/p>\n

Jo Charrington, president of Dean\u2019s label Capitol Records UK, says that Dean is \u201csuper intentional about what kind of records she wants to make \u2013 and that\u2019s not common\u201d. Charrington says that some artists she works with have an unfocused process, and \u201cwill want to write, like, 200 songs, and we\u2019ll get 10. For Olivia, once she had an idea of the record she wanted to make, she would go, \u2018This is the timeframe I want to do it in, let\u2019s do it.\u2019 And you just believe her \u2013 it\u2019s real confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018She is such a light\u2019 \u2026 former classmate Rachel Chinouriri. Photograph: Dave Benett\/Jed Cullen\/Getty Images for British Vogue<\/p>\n

Dean was raised in Highams Park, east London, in a musical family, which she has said sparked her love of writing and performing. At 15, she was accepted into the Brit school<\/a>, the prestigious performing arts academy that Adele and Amy Winehouse, among others, also attended. Dean\u2019s Brit school classmate Rachel Chinouriri, a successful musician in her own right, says she admires how Dean\u2019s music \u201cis an extension of her\u201d, adding that Dean herself \u201cis such a light. You can tell she really wants the best for herself and to extend that to everyone who surrounds her\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dean began releasing music aged 19, in 2018, and released Messy in 2023<\/a>, after spending her pandemic years building a dedicated fanbase on social media. Messy was, for a debut album, a big success, but Charrington says that Dean was focused on her follow-up just a short time later, and Chinouriri notes: \u201cEven though her music has changed, in a way, the through-line is still the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond Man I Need, numerous other songs have resonated massively: this week she and Sam Fender are at No 1 for a second week with their collaboration Rein Me In \u2013 after a historic 35-week climb to the top \u2013 and Dean is also at No 2 with So Easy (To Fall in Love).<\/p>\n

Knockout charisma \u2026 at the Grammys. Photograph: Gilbert Flores\/Billboard\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Willem Ward, the Capitol A&R Dean chose to work with on The Art of Loving, says Dean is \u201cintentional with everything she does\u201d. While writing The Art of Loving, he says, \u201cshe was reading books by [authors such as] bell hooks<\/a>, which were quite informative for her,\u201d he says. \u201cOne of the first things she said was, \u2018Sometimes, the saying get outside of your comfort zone is confusing to me, because I really want to be in my comfort zone.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

So, rather than make a pop record in Los Angeles, as so many musicians do, Dean decamped to a house in Hackney, east London, that her label converted into a studio, and worked with a group of producers including Matt Hales and Zach Nahome, who she felt most comfortable with. \u201cWhen she\u2019s writing, they\u2019re such personal stories,\u201d says Ward. \u201cShe wanted to be somewhere physically, and with people [she knew], that allowed her to tap into that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr, who co-wrote Man I Need with Dean, tells me that she \u201cjust had it all \u2013 it was a pleasure to work with her. She was very sure of what she did and did not like, which made the process very easy for both of us. I left those sessions and called my manager and said: \u2018She\u2019s amazing, her album\u2019s gonna kill it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Jesso\u2019s prediction came true: The Art of Loving has sold 430,000 copies in the UK alone, a huge figure for any artist, let alone one so young. It\u2019s due in no small part to Man I Need, which is so suffused with the light that Chinouriri mentions, evidenced by Dean\u2019s knockout performances of the song on SNL and at the Grammys. Charrington thinks the song \u201cconnected and resonated with people at a time when they need some fun\u201d, before adding: \u201cAnd it\u2019s a lot of hard work. I will say: she works bloody hard.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saturday\u2019s Brit awards will feature performances from heavy hitters such as Harry Styles and Mark Ronson \u2013 but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-307084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}