“The Art of Loving” by Olivia Dean
★★★
Olivia Dean’s top-10-selling second album is “a genuinely lovely collection of would-be classic pop songs,” said Walden Green in Pitchfork. On her current single, “So Easy,” the warm-toned British neo-soul singer declares “I’m the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life,” and that’s about right. She and producer Zach Nahome deftly blend plenty of sounds from the past: “a spare set of bongos from a Laurel Canyon open mic, a buttery Brill Building Rhodes organ, and some well-placed bah-bah-bahs courtesy of Motown girl groups.” But the results sometimes sound like mere background music, and a couple “cross the line from charmingly retro into pastiche.”
Still, The Art of Loving “expunges most of the clichés of Dean’s debut album,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian, putting mild twists on familiar sounds and adding “diaristic detail,” such as an aside about not being able to find the cutlery or light switch in a lover’s unfamiliar home. This breezy pop album has made Dean an even bigger star in the U.K., and no wonder: “It’s “exceptionally well made but feels entirely natural” and “every chorus has been polished until it catches the light.”
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“Fatal Optimist” by Madi Diaz
★★★
“Madi Diaz has a talent for brief, yet devastating observations,” said Maura Johnston in Rolling Stone. “A songwriter’s songwriter,” the 39-year-old Nashville veteran was Grammy nominated for her previous album, 2024’s Weird Faith, and she has stripped down her sound for this breakup album written after she moved on from exasperation with a failed relationship to acceptance and renewed hope. “Diaz has a rounded, plainly emotional alto that adds pathos to the more downtrodden lyrics,” and though she lets light filter in only on the closing track, the arc of the album and Diaz’s perceptive songwriting “make that movement feel like a victory.”
Across its first 10 tracks, “Fatal Optimist offers occasional philosophical gems,” said Marcy Donelson in All Music. “One day I’ll wake up and I’ll be over you—if time does what it’s supposed to,” she sings in one verse. And even the record’s rousing closing tune, the one that brings in a full band for the first time and talks about the sky clearing and the sun breaking through, tugs at the heart. “I hate being right,” she sings—not once, but over and over again.
“Nested in Tangles” by Hannah Frances
★★★
Hannah Frances “belongs in a wise old souls hall of fame,” said Chris DeVille in Stereogum. Like Sharon Van Etten or Joni Mitchell, the Vermont-based singer-songwriter “can summon tenderness and ferocity, hope and despair” in a single line. On her sixth album, Frances is focused on healing from family dysfunction, and though her voice sounds as old as folk, the music “evokes many generations of proggy, jazzy indie rock.” Many of the songs push forward “with both anxiousness and fluidity, soaring on eagles’ wings and then crashing downward.”
To convey roiling emotions in the song “Surviving You,” Frances combines “noisy, pulled-apart” rock elements and nervous split-screen storytelling, said Matt Mitchell in Paste. “When Frances aches, we ache.” Abandonment and healing are recurring themes, and the words are layered atop “soups of deviating tempos, breathy synths, tinny guitars, and rattling percussion.” The lyrical content “makes for a difficult listen.” Where Frances’ previous album argued that loss prompts growth, Nestled in Tangles “concedes that life-spanning hurt is not to be defeated, only transformed.”
