Olivia Dean Found a House Where No Music Had Been Made
The decision that shaped The Art of Loving was made before a note was written. Rather than book studio time, Olivia Dean and her collaborators found an ordinary house in East London, set a studio up inside it, and she moved in.
“No music had ever been made there before,” she told Numero. “We found a house and I lived in it for eight weeks… I needed to focus to imagine stories that felt honest and warm.”
Why an Empty House and Not a Studio
The detail that matters in that sentence is the first clause. A recording studio is a room with a history: other people’s sessions, other people’s habits, a house engineer with opinions, and a clock. Every decision made in one is made against the memory of what has worked there before.
A house with no musical past has none of that, and it also has none of the affordances. There is no live room, no isolation, no glass between the performer and the person listening. What you get instead is proximity and time, which are the two things a record about intimacy would actually need.
Living in it for eight weeks removes the other constraint. Studio time is billed and therefore rationed, and the rationing shapes the songs: you arrive with the idea already formed, because working it out on the clock is expensive. Moving in inverts that. The idea can be worked out at two in the afternoon or not at all that day, and nothing is lost either way.
The Record That Came Out of It
The Art of Loving is Dean’s second studio album, released in September 2025, following Messy in 2023. It moves along the line between traditional soul and pop, and it takes love as its subject in the widest available sense: romantic, platonic and self-directed, rather than only the first of those.
That breadth is the choice most second albums do not make. A follow-up to a well-received debut usually narrows, because the artist now knows which parts worked. Widening the definition of the subject instead is a decision to be less certain in public, and the house is where that decision became practical rather than theoretical.
Dean has described her writing as grounded in reality rather than fiction, and her songs as small portions of life. Born in 1999 in Haringey to a British father and a Jamaican-Guyanese mother, she grew up in Walthamstow surrounded by gospel music, and the arrangements carry that inheritance without imitating it.
What the Record Has Already Won
In February 2026 she won at both the Grammy Awards and the BRIT Awards. Two ceremonies in the same month, in two countries with different tastes, is an unusually clean result for a second album.
What that does to an artist’s next move is the interesting part. Awards create an expectation of continuity, and continuity is the enemy of the process described above. The method that produced this record depended on nobody knowing what it was going to be, including her.
The album also introduced a large young audience to a set of sounds it had not necessarily sought out. Marie Claire described the effect as bringing classic, romantic sounds to a generation that found them through streaming rather than through a parent’s record shelf.
The Long Route to a Second Album
Nothing about the path here was quick, which is part of why the house made sense. Dean has been writing since her teens; she has named a song called “Slowly”, written when she was sixteen, as the one that best captures her vulnerability, while pointing to “Carmen” as the more accomplished piece of craft.
That distinction, between the song that is most honest and the song that is best made, is the working problem of her whole catalogue. Soul is a form in which technical polish can quietly remove the thing the listener came for, and a singer who can hear the difference between the two spends a career managing the gap. A record made in a house is one answer to that problem: the arrangements can be careful without the performance becoming careful too.
She has also been candid about the limits of the studio as a social space. Describing a session in Los Angeles alongside far more established figures, she has said that being intimidated by another artist makes creativity difficult, that you freeze and cannot speak up, and that out of ten ideas offered, nine will be bad. The good one only arrives if the bad nine are survivable.
Read that alongside the eight weeks in an empty house and the logic closes. If most of the work of writing is producing material that will be discarded, then the single most valuable property of a room is that discarding costs nothing in it. No hourly rate, no engineer waiting, no other artist in the corner. Just the same four walls tomorrow.
A Second Mercury Nomination, and What It Is Up Against
The Art of Loving is on the Mercury Prize shortlist, the second time Dean has been nominated. The winner is announced on 22 October at the Utilita Arena in Newcastle, where the prize returns after Sam Fender won last year for People Watching.
NME’s rundown of the twelve albums shows what she is against: Paul McCartney on the shortlist for the first time, Dave returning after winning in 2019, Florence + The Machine nominated for a fourth time, RAYE back again, and the War Child charity compilation Help(2) among the nominees. Eligible albums had to be released by British or Irish artists between 30 August 2025 and 17 July 2026.
A second nomination reads differently from a first. The first says an artist has arrived; the second says the arrival was not a coincidence, and it puts a record in front of a jury that has already assessed the person who made it.
What the Method Costs
It would be easy to present the house as a straightforwardly better way to work, and it is not. Eight weeks living inside your own project is a long time to be unable to leave the job, and the absence of a clock removes the pressure that finishes records as often as it ruins them.
There is also the matter of what a house cannot do. Rooms built for recording exist because untreated domestic spaces are acoustically difficult: parallel walls, low ceilings, windows. Choosing one anyway means accepting a specific character in the sound and building the arrangements around it rather than fighting it. On a soul record that trade is usually worth making, because the genre rewards air and imperfection. On a different kind of record it would be a serious handicap.
Dean has spoken about the difficulty of being creative when intimidated, describing a Los Angeles session where nerves made it hard to contribute at all, and noting that most ideas offered in a room are bad ones on the way to a good one. That is the clearest argument for the house there is. A space with no history and no audience is a space where the nine bad ideas cost nothing.
What Happens After 22 October
Whether the Mercury goes to The Art of Loving or elsewhere, the more interesting question is what the third record does with the lesson of the second. The house was a solution to a specific problem: how to write honestly and warmly on demand. That problem does not go away, and the solution is not obviously repeatable, because the value of the room came partly from its being unfamiliar.
What can be carried forward is the principle underneath it, which is that the conditions of making are part of the writing rather than logistics arranged around it. Plenty of records are shaped by a room without anyone deciding it should be; this one was shaped by a room chosen on purpose. Records built around a single deliberate constraint tend to be the ones worth returning to, as with Markus Nokio, The Orphan and the violin that answers the piano.
The Mercury Prize winner is announced on 22 October at the Utilita Arena in Newcastle.