The Grammys’ best new artist category is a reliable marker of the kind of British artist the US can comfortably hold to its collective bosom. Past recipients include Sade, Adele and Dua Lipa, and their careers all took off in the States after being introduced to the American mainstream via the country’s biggest music awards ceremony. Now it is the turn of Olivia Dean.
Dean is a 26-year-old former attendee of the Brit School, the south London comprehensive that has proved remarkably adept at producing pop stars; this year’s Grammy winners also included the Brit School alumnae Lola Young, FKA Twigs and Raye.
Dean is exactly the kind of singer the Brit School is particularly good at shaping: one who exudes soulful classicism while combining old-school glamour with the common touch. In Dean’s case, that’s helped by her unwavering support of her local football team through good times and, currently, bad: West Ham.
“It was a big day for me. I said it on stage,” Dean told Capital Radio after performing at the London Stadium, home ground to the Irons, in June 2025. Unfortunately she was supporting Sam Fender, the Bruce Springsteen of the northeast, and the audience did not share her fealty. “I got booed. They’re Newcastle fans, which I didn’t quite realise.”
In spite of such partisan opposition Dean’s tour with Fender, during which they performed their hit duet Rein Me In, a jazz-inflected tale of learning to give yourself over to another person, marked the turning point in a career from young hopeful to global superstar.
The tour came a few months before the release of her second album, The Art of Loving; a concept piece on the nature of love, inspired in part by the writing of the American feminist author Bell Hooks, but infused with an accessibility that has seen Dean become the first British female artist to have four singles in the Top Ten at the same time.
In her Grammys speech she was not afraid to wade into the volatile climate in America amid the hugely controversial ICE raids. “I’m up here as a granddaughter of an immigrant,” she said. She is also the cousin of Ashley Walters, a former member of the pioneering hip-hop collective So Solid Crew who went on to have a successful acting career, most notably in the crime drama Top Boy.
Dean grew up in Walthamstow, northeast London, where her English father introduced her to the soulful, singer-songwriter world of Al Green and Carole King, while her Jamaican-Guyanese barrister mother was a fan of 1990s neo-soul singers such as Lauryn Hill and Angie Stone.
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You can hear all those influences in her music. Presumably, they helped to guide her direction in life too: Dean says she knew what she wanted to do from the age of eight. Overcoming early shyness, she took classes in musical theatre before getting into the Brit School at 15.
“I was just that kind of girl who was always in the school shows, singing in assemblies,” she said in 2020, on making an hour and 45 minute-commute from her parents’ house in Walthamstow to the Brit School in Croydon. “When I got there I realised, ‘Oh, everyone’s that kid in assemblies.’ In terms of music, Brit was a really good thing for me.”
It was also really good for her career. Dean was performing in a final-year show at the school in 2017 when she was spotted by Emily Braham of Yo&Co management. Braham guided her towards touring as a backing singer for the dance pop collective Rudimental, a traditional stepping stone to solo success: past singers for the group have included the pop stars Anne-Marie and Ella Eyre.
Dean performing at the Grammys
KEVIN MAZUR/THE RECORDING ACADEMY/GETTY IMAGES
Dean’s 2023 debut album, Messy, with its crackly vinyl sounds and horn blasts denoting vintage authenticity, put her on the map. “I’m a pretty old soul,” she confirmed in 2023. “I like live gigs, I like doing stuff with bands, and I don’t like TikTok. I would never post a video of me talking into my phone because it creeps me the hell out.”
She looked all set for a respectable if unspectacular career as a singer of the Later… with Jools Holland-friendly, retro-soul sort, cover versions of Aretha Franklin favourites included.
Instead Dean’s second album resulted in the singer going stratospheric, and its success lies in its very lack of edge. At an unusually volatile period of world history, Man I Need’s return to Carpenters-style gentleness, smooth arrangements reminiscent of Sade, and polished soft rock choruses with a touch of Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac offer a balm to the stresses of the attention-deficit online world.
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Aligned to Dean’s unhurried singing, free of vocal affectations or autotuned effects, and filled with such old-fashioned sentiments as treating your romantic partner well (Nice to Each Other) and having a crush on someone (the title track), and Man I Need has become an album for the times.
Dean, then, is a sophisticated, jazz-inflected, easy-listening singer, offering a pleasant if hardly revolutionary approach to songs about love as a many splendoured thing. But there is a lot of warmth in her singing, which, with her movie star looks and sunny demeanour, has helped to make her the kind of charismatic British star America loves. It might be too early to call Olivia Dean the new Adele, but she’s certainly heading that way.