Olivia Dean, Gen Z’s Easy Listening Queen

Sometimes artists just spell it out for you. "I'm very pro-comfort zone," singer-songwriter Olivia Dean told Elle, promoting her new album The Art Of Loving and its sleepy sleeper hit "Man I Need," which she'll surely perform this weekend in her Saturday Night Live debut. The single, already a #1 hit in the UK, recently went top 5 in the United States as well. That's maybe a little surprising numerically — the upper echelons of the charts are still hoarded stubbornly by the Taylor Swifts of the world — but the single's appeal is obvious: a head-bobbing love song made for early-evening wedding dances, while the parents are still up. The percussion is a homage to "The Way You Make Me Feel," while Dean's vocal line do-si-dos with the piano hook to "Cherish." The song's about crushing, of course — or, more precisely, setting a crushy, carefree mood: "Bossa nova on all night — it's like a kind of alchemy." That line doubles as a sneaky promo for Dean's own brand of good-mood music; it sounds crafted and A/B tested as a soundbite for one of her many preternaturally poised media appearances.

Not that Dean's artistry is a hard sell, then or now: Give or take a few TikTok hits, her career could have unfolded 15 years ago in basically the same way. Dean, of Jamaican-Guyanese and English descent, was raised on soft pop, neo-soul (her middle name is Lauryn), and musical theater repertory — one of her childhood audition songs was "Tomorrow" from ANNIE. She attended the BRIT School, a music-industry scouting ground whose alumni include Adele, Leona Lewis, and RAYE, and graduated with that most British of honors: doing a semi-credited guest vocal for one of the UK's many journeyman dance producers. (Specifically, she sang on Rudimental's pop-D&B single "Adrenaline," where she went by OLIVIA. I hope streaming services have their metadata sorted, lest they start autoplaying the earlier Olivia feature "Candy Shop.") That led to a development deal with AMF Records — then a subsidiary of Virgin EMI — and later, a US deal with Island Records. During lockdown, she did a mini-tour with a bright yellow "sunshine van," temperamentally reluctant to chase viral streaming fame; streaming success followed nevertheless. All the accolades followed, too: Mercury Prize nomination, BRIT Awards shortlist, and just recently, a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. No doubt she's eyeing many more Grammys when next year's nominations roll around.

Dean's story is almost too perfect — especially for the kind of person who attributes her success to classic pop music winning in a musical marketplace of ideas rather than, say, her signing with Island during a generational A&R tear for the label. As always, this is reductive. Dean's musical influences are what you'd expect: Carole King, Angie Stone, Amy Winehouse. (Well, mostly as you'd expect: Father John Misty??) When she sounds like Raye, it's not the harder-edged pop nor her multi-part, minor-key excavations of the soul like "GENESIS," but her chiller material like "Worth It." When she sounds like Adele, it's "Easy On Me," not "Rolling In The Deep"; no fire is being set to any rain. She only sounds like Amy Winehouse or Lauryn Hill if you forget about their respective personalities.

And her music has only grown more refined with time. The mild Lily Allen sauciness and stomp-clap energy of Dean's early single "Ok Love You Bye" sound downright raucous in comparison to most of her debut, Messy; in turn, the metallic harmonies on that album's "UFO" or the would-be Mark Ronson audition of "Dive" are bold and brassy compared to the smoother material on The Art Of Loving. The listening's easy: the aforementioned bossa nova, as well as doowop, lounge jazz and Burt Bacharach-isms like the horns that punctuate "So Easy (To Fall In Love)." She loves ba-ba-breezy scatting — a quirk that inspired "Man I Need" and that reaches its final form on (ba-ba-ba) "Baby Steps." She likes metaphors that fall, as Lionel Richie put it, easy like Sunday morning. Sometimes too much so; at one point she describes herself as the "perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life," a much-quoted line that unfortunately reads exactly like an AI-generated Hinge profile.

Unlike her predecessors in this kind of crossover music, whose adult-contemporary fame became an incredibly lucrative pigeonhole — Jones told The Wall Street Journal in 2012 that she "would love it if people didn't think about me as their grandma's music" — Dean has had no problem drawing younger fans. This is probably because her music, while not introspective exactly, packages insights about love and loss in a way that appeals to a generation used to reflecting upon relationships one reel at a time. ("Baby Steps" in particular is all over the kind of TikToks that muse about "doing the work.")

Her opening for Sabrina Carpenter in the US seems bizarre at first, as the two artists have almost nothing in common — but what they do share is a broad empowerment feminism, unapologetic but smiling. Dean may not outright zing her lyrical subjects like Carpenter does, but she nevertheless has little patience for manchildren. "Let Alone The One You Love" is the most winsome of lectures: "Who would do that to a friend?" "Nice To Each Other" turns its wry Breeders title into a manual for healthier hookups: no expectations, just communication. The arrangement is breezy and well-crafted — most of The Art Of Loving's craft comes out in the small details, like the spacey whooshes in the intro — but nothing Dean isn't willing to cut out entirely to better punctuate lyrics like "I don't want a boyfriend." Audiences love it.

In music, though, broad empowerment can only go so far; when Dean insists she's not going to "dial it back a bit" on "Let Alone The One You Love," it's her asserting her right to... doo-wop a little harder. The slightly heavier string arrangement and slightly stark guitar line on "Loud" are nothing outside the ballad Overton window, but on this album, they're practically "Stairway To Heaven." The track doesn't quite work; the string arrangement, especially toward the end, demands a Bond-theme level of drama Dean can't or won't provide. Perhaps she feels that's the kind of romantic drama she'd rather not revisit — she told NPR she only recorded one vocal take of "Loud," finding the song too intense. Nevertheless, it's the closest she comes to real emotional maturity, rather than maturity as a genre.

None of this criticism is anything Dean hasn't thought of. She elaborated on that comfort-zone quote: "I was thinking about that concept of people saying, 'You've got to get out of your comfort zone, and it's album two, and you need to go crazy now.' ... But for me, I almost wanted to double down on the musical relationships I had created. I work really well in my comfort zone." If The Art Of Loving probably isn't the album Dean would make without music industry intervention — without the BRIT finishing school, she might still be a theater kid — it does seem like exactly the album she wanted to make. Her talent is undeniable, and her future is unlimited. And several of her predecessors have done promising things with their own unlimited futures. Think Jessie Ware going from stuffy singles like "Say You Love Me" to hedonistic disco extravaganzas, or Corinne Bailey Rae expanding her vision from the blandly likeable "Put Your Records On" to more ambitious material like "Been To The Moon." Who can say what one's comfort zone will be in 10 years?

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