“Polished”, “devoid of cliche” and “timeless” – these are all phrases that have been attributed to rising English pop star Olivia Dean after her latest album, The Art of Loving, was released in early Sept 2025. Despite her relative anonymity in the US, Olivia Dean has begun catching critics’ attention especially after she announced she’d be opening for Sabrina Carpenter’s 2025 leg of the famous “Short n’ Sweet Tour”. After nearly 9 years in the industry, beginning when she was just 17, Olivia Dean is finally beginning to enjoy the larger rewards of her hard work, reaching nearly 36 million monthly listeners as of October 2025.
Dean has often cited her complex feelings about her career as being one of her main inspirations: especially after her time at BRIT School, a free-to-attend but difficult to impress performing arts school in Selhurst, England. At just 15, she was making 3-hour round trips just to attend classes everyday, and found herself struggling with motivation and burnout.
“I wanted to go there like hell or high water,” she said, in an interview with the BBC.“The tap has to run brown before it runs clear. I just can’t express enough that I’ve written a lot of bad songs.”
Dean, however, utilized this struggle in a way that benefitted her: attracting the attention of managers. At her graduation concert in 2019 for BRIT school, she played an original piece which impressed Emily Braham, who became her manager and still works with the singer today.
Braham secured Dean an audition with popular soul and house music group, Rudimental, which, to her shock, she passed. Olivia Dean’s first show was in front of 16,000 people at the Sziget Festival in Budapest, as a backing vocalist for the band. Later that same year, she would go on to release her first EP, titled “Ok Love You Bye”. The soul-infused nature of the title track drew many listeners her way, and many appreciated the cutting honesty of the lyrics.
After the success of this EP, Olivia Dean began planning for her debut album, “Messy”. The process was long and difficult, requiring her to travel back to the reasons she even began pursuing music in the first place. “I love art in many different forms. I was listening to a lot of vinyl and crate-digging, and listening to a lot of Brazilian music.” said Dean, in an interview with Vogue Magazine. “I’d really love to go back to Brazil. I would love to go to Carnival and really just leave it all in the street at my feet.” Inspired by soulful, beat-focused styles like Brazillian, Dean eventually dropped the 12-song album on June 30th, 2023. Fans were instantly impressed: the style had a clearly more mature feel to it, especially when compared with her previous EP. Amelia Barret, journalist for music magazine When The Horn Blows, commented that the album touched on themes previously unexplored, like “the difficulty and change that growth brings, communicating how Dean finds herself through the creation of music.” Another fan, English journalist Issy Packer from the music website “Clunk”, speaks on behalf of Olivia Dean’s fans in the latter half of her review, saying “Navigating life and love. These repeating tropes do not offer anything new…but it’s Dean’s sound that makes it so distinctive.”
Now in 2025, just a month after the release of The Art of Loving, Dean has begun to spread her influence outside of the UK. “Nice To Each Other”, the album’s most popular track, has caught the eyes of many American listeners. Joanna Rose, writing for the California based music website “The Honey Pop”, comments on “Nice To Each Other”’s unique blend of pop and soul, saying it felt “complicated, sweet, a little messy, but ultimately and entirely human.” With her U.S. debut on Sabrina Carpenter’s tour and the release of her new album, Dean seems on the way to gain the wider audience she’s long deserved.