EPISODE 1: OLIVIA DEAN 🍓

July 10, 2026

How I found this artist

So, I was first introduced to Olivia Dean in 2024, during a scene of Heartstopper where her song "Dive" was playing over a compilation of Nick and Charlie. Now, this song includes lyrics like "You got me from my head to my feet" and "I'm ready to dive," which kind of foreshadowed the events in the episode because the boys were about to take the next step in their relationship (AKA have sex for the first time). So my first impression of Olivia was that she only really wrote songs about romance, but as I was researching her this week, I came to realise that her music is actually much more multifaceted than that.

I read this interview where Olivia describes her music as like "a good bowl of soup; something good for the soul that you can return to," which is the most beautiful metaphor to explain the timelessness of music that I have ever heard, and it perfectly explained how I felt about the song Dive. I mean, I heard the song first when I was 14 and I had yet to experience romantic love for myself, meaning I only had the characters on the screen to relate these lyrics to. But when I rewatched the show just a year later, I was able to return to those lyrics and reinterpret them based on my latest experience of being in love for the first time, which meant I was able to relate the ideas discussed within the song — about feeling encapsulated by love and ready to commit to a relationship — to my experiences with my boyfriend. So whilst the song's lyrics didn't change in that year, love's definition to me had changed, which made me wonder: what even is the definition of love in the first place? And I think Olivia's music helped me to find the answer.

Wider context of Dive

Now as I said before, Dive is very clearly a song with a narrative centred around romance, but I was keen to see if that was the case for the rest of the songs on the Messy album. So, "Messy" was Olivia's first album, released in 2023 and produced by EMI Records, and she dedicated the album (and a song we will come to later) to her grandmother, who bravely came to England as part of the Windrush generation at just 18. She also dedicated her Brit Award for "Best New Artist" to her grandmother with a beautiful speech about how her grandmother's courage allowed her to stand on that stage and make the music she loves to make — such a breath of fresh air, especially in a world that tries to push right-wing narratives onto immigrants. It's so important that Olivia can use her platform to tell such a beautiful story of immigration and its effects.

So, the idea I held about Olivia as just another love song writer was very quickly proven wrong, and the album I thought was going to be about romance actually turned out to be incredibly passionate about sharing her love for her family and culture. What I assumed to be a love album actually transpired to be an album dedicated to a love of heritage and family history. Even in its very early stages this family sentiment was present, because I discovered that before the title "Messy," Olivia had the title "Between Islands," which originated from a museum exhibition on the Windrush generation — and that only solidified what I was beginning to feel: Olivia doesn't see love as beginning with a partner, but beginning with your heritage.

Obviously, that did not end up being the album title, and instead the name "Messy" emerged, which at first didn't really make that much sense to me, because so far I had seen so much attention to detail and consideration poured into this piece of art, and it felt contradictory to then label it as messy. But when I listened to the entire album, I came to understand the name a lot better. When I was researching Olivia, I struggled to categorise her music under one specific genre bracket — she has some soul influence, a bit of R&B and Motown, and obviously that pop sound integrated too — and the title "Messy" seemingly emerged from a struggle of self-definition, but almost acts as an acceptance of the amalgamation of influences and sounds that are present. Ultimately, we live in such a media-saturated world nowadays, exposed to so many films, songs, artists, and shows that we love, that we create our identities based on a combination of them all. Identity is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing — it is a way of defining ourselves that evolves and grows as we get older. So now, I had observed elements of romantic love in her lyricism, cultural love in her dedications to her grandma, and self-love in her complex character. Three definitions of love in just one album, without even unpacking the rest of the tracks on Messy.

Deeper dive into other tracks on Messy

Now, the opening track of Messy is called UFO, and it caught my attention because Dean described herself as "not a very abstract person" — someone who tends to ground her work in reality — but the song has lyrics like "I'm tryna fly a UFO, I don't really do this often, I forgot all the controls, me and my sexy problems," which is a metaphor for the uncertainties of love and the desperacy for stability in a relationship. It's basically her way of saying "I have forgotten how to do this love thing, and yet somebody has sparked a hope for me to try and attain a stable and loving relationship." Essentially, it's a representation of typical romantic love and the fears it creates.

On the album, there is also the track "Carmen," which I mentioned earlier, and this is Olivia's self-professed favourite track on the album — I think because it is so vulnerable and personal, but also because its lyricism ties back to her deep love for her grandmother, who she has persistently expressed her admiration for. She continues to express that in the song with lyrics like "You transplanted a family tree and a part of it grew into me" and "The only place I wanna stand is holding onto grandma's hand." And suddenly it became blatantly obvious to me that actually, love does not begin with a partner like the world has always told us it does, but with family and heritage and culture. And moreover, love extends beyond romance and into admiration.

Collaborations

So then I began to think about Olivia's collaborations and how they might have emerged from admiration, which led me to her most infamous collaboration on the track "Rein Me In" with none other than Sam Fender. Now this collaboration didn't just appear out of nowhere, but from a mutual love for each other's art, and I actually watched this interview Olivia did with NME back in 2022 where she was talking about her love for the Geordie singer: "I'm really excited to see Sam Fender perform, I really loved his last album and I haven't met him yet so that would be cool." I was particularly intrigued by the word "love" here, because even though she had never met Sam, she says she loves him — and this just amplified my belief that love is rooted in admiration and isn't just defined by romance.

Then, fast forward three years after that interview, Olivia was joining Sam as an opener for some shows on his People Watching tour, which proves this love/admiration was mutual. Obviously the song was a huge hit, becoming Sam Fender's first song and Olivia Dean's second song to reach number one on the UK Singles Chart in February this year, also winning a Brit Award for Song Of The Year. However, my favourite achievement by far was it breaking the record for the most consecutive weeks in the Top 40 before reaching number one, beating previous record holder Ed Sheeran with the track "Thinking Out Loud," which took 19 weeks. So, take a guess how many weeks it took "Rein Me In" to climb to number one? It took 35 weeks — almost doubling the previous record, which I thought was crazy. But I digress, and make the point that collaborations are like admiration becoming art, and love becoming listenable — by this definition, collaborations could be considered an act of love.

The Art Of Loving

And if you thought Olivia's quest to redefine love ended with "Messy," then you would be wrong, because on the 26th of September 2025, she dropped her second album, literally titled "The Art Of Loving," which she described as "a deep-dive on love, to understand why I love the way that I do, and how I love other people."

Now, these two albums have been described as sisters, with both of their covers utilising a similar blurred effect, which to me expresses a desire for the songs on these records to be read as universal experiences rather than personal ones. It demonstrates an acceptance that the meaning and backstory behind each song aren't going to be applicable to everybody, and it almost gives permission for her words to be interpreted however best suits the listener — because ultimately, everybody is messy in their own unique way, and equally, everybody defines love in very different ways. I think it's important to realise that love is more than a feeling that can be rigidly defined — it's an act so specific to every individual — and The Art Of Loving is basically built on the foundation of this sentiment.

bell hooks

So, starting with the origin of the title, I discovered that it came from an art exhibition by Mickalene Thomas called "All About Love," which is a reference to a book by feminist author bell hooks, who essentially suggests that love requires action, not just emotion. In her book, she uses this really interesting metaphor about a passive painter who stares at a blank canvas, intending for a painting to be completed, but never even picking up the paintbrush to act on the desire — which is so applicable to love, because you can't expect emotion to solely carry love; there has to be meaningful action too. Olivia references this idea in the intro track to the album where she says "we gotta throw some paint, because that's what bell would say." So, she is very clearly inspired by bell hooks' definition of love as action rather than passive, and she transforms that from words on a page into song, spreading this new definition to a far wider audience than ever before.

Then you also have tracks such as "I've Seen It," a really beautiful song that discusses all the forms of love Olivia has witnessed in her lifetime, which reminded me of that viral Love Actually quote — the sentiment that "love is actually all around." Now, I could deep-dive into the other 11 songs on this masterpiece, but with this one song, Olivia manages to answer my question of what the definition of love is: love is whatever you make it.