Hard work, romance and bell hooks: how Olivia Dean became British pop’s newest megastar
After a Grammy and a global breakthrough, the 26-year-old singer could sweep the board at next week’s Brits. Her closest collaborators explain her massive appeal
Saturday’s Brit awards will feature performances from heavy hitters 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 breakouts in years, thanks to her second album The Art of Loving and its mega-smash UK No 1 single Man I Need. Nominated for five awards, this year’s 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.
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 – she somehow captures both the otherworldly poise of Diana Ross and the charm of your best friend killing it at karaoke – and has become the voice of a generation whose romantic lives have been complicated by dating apps and other digitally mediated mating rituals.
Her rise has been a blink-and-you’ll-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’t 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 – 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 – and No 8 on the US Billboard chart.
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’s blockbuster Short N Sweet tour, which included five dates at New York’s 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.
A few weeks later, she snagged the Grammy for best new artist – a hugely prestigious award won in recent years by Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish – and won further plaudits for an acceptance speech celebrating the cultural enrichment created by immigration (“I’m a product of bravery, and I think those people deserve to be celebrated,” 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.
Jo Charrington, president of Dean’s label Capitol Records UK, says that Dean is “super intentional about what kind of records she wants to make – and that’s not common”. Charrington says that some artists she works with have an unfocused process, and “will want to write, like, 200 songs, and we’ll get 10. For Olivia, once she had an idea of the record she wanted to make, she would go, ‘This is the timeframe I want to do it in, let’s do it.’ And you just believe her – it’s real confidence.”
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, the prestigious performing arts academy that Adele and Amy Winehouse, among others, also attended. Dean’s Brit school classmate Rachel Chinouriri, a successful musician in her own right, says she admires how 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 to extend that to everyone who surrounds her”.
Dean began releasing music aged 19, in 2018, and released Messy in 2023, 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: “Even though her music has changed, in a way, the through-line is still the same.”
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 – after a historic 35-week climb to the top – and Dean is also at No 2 with So Easy (To Fall in Love).
Willem Ward, the Capitol A&R Dean chose to work with on The Art of Loving, says Dean is “intentional with everything she does”. While writing The Art of Loving, he says, “she was reading books by [authors such as] bell hooks, which were quite informative for her,” he says. “One of the first things she said was, ‘Sometimes, the saying get outside of your comfort zone is confusing to me, because I really want to be in my comfort zone.’”
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. “When she’s writing, they’re such personal stories,” says Ward. “She wanted to be somewhere physically, and with people [she knew], that allowed her to tap into that.”
Singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr, who co-wrote Man I Need with Dean, tells me that she “just had it all – 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: ‘She’s amazing, her album’s gonna kill it.’”
Jesso’s 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’s due in no small part to Man I Need, which is so suffused with the light that Chinouriri mentions, evidenced by Dean’s knockout performances of the song on SNL and at the Grammys. Charrington thinks the song “connected and resonated with people at a time when they need some fun”, before adding: “And it’s a lot of hard work. I will say: she works bloody hard.”