October 2025

Listening to The Art of Loving feels like stepping into someone’s kitchen on a Sunday morning -- coffee brewing, sunlight spilling across the counter, a soulful record spinning low in the background. Olivia Dean has always written like she’s letting you in on something -- but here, she’s letting you stay.

Her second album isn’t a manual on love so much as a series of letters written to every version of herself that’s ever loved and lost. It’s soft, but never simple. She moves through self-love, friendship, heartbreak, and renewal with the same curiosity she’s always had -- except now, she sounds steadier, more certain of the mess she’s in.

There’s something beautifully ordinary about her lyrics. When she sings “I don’t know where the switches are / or where you keep the cutlery,” it’s not about grand love, it’s about the awkward tenderness of learning or relearning someone’s rhythms. Listening to the Man I Need, you can't help but want to dance and move around. The joy of the song is infectious, you can feel her smile behind the mic, that small knowing smile of someone who’s learning & yearning for someone’s love & attention.

The production mirrors that feeling: warm horns, soft keys, gentle bass lines that glide rather than push. “Nice to Each Other” hums like an old photograph; “Man I Need” aches in that bittersweet, late night way...the kind that makes you want to text someone you shouldn’t.

But what I love most is how human this record feels. There’s no pretense, no spectacle. Dean doesn’t perform her emotions -- she talks through them. It’s an album that lets you breathe.

If Messy was about trying to figure out who she was, The Art Of Loving is the moment she stops trying and just accepts that there is no one single version of herself, she'll always be growing into different versions of Olivia Dean.

It’s the sound of growing up without hardening.
It’s the sound of grace in motion.
It’s the sound of someone finally coming home to themselves.

Favorite tracks: “Nice to Each Other”, "Lady Lady", “Man I Need”, "So Easy (To Fall In Love)", “A Couple Minutes”

November 2025

The album of the month was supposed to be someone entirely different. I had already planned to spend November sinking into the ethereal dream-pop haze of Julee Cruise, but then -- somewhere between 11/10 and 11/11, when the night stretched thin and TikTok kept me awake longer than it should have, I stumbled across a video of Adeline singing “Family 2”, It was soft, unguarded, and strangely magnetic. Naturally, I snooped through her socials, opened her Spotify page, and let evil, baby, evil play. Three full listens later, sometime well past midnight, I decided Julee Cruise could wait until December.

From the very first notes of evil, baby, evil, Evil Adeline delivers an intimate, bruised, and deeply confessional record that feels like the soundtrack to a late-night internal monologue. With just nine tracks and a runtime barely over 21 minutes, this album is brief but resonant -- every second seems deliberately pared down, raw, and emotionally exposed.

Musically, the album leans into a kind of indie, bedroom-pop minimalism: soft, whispery vocals, spare electronics, gentle synths, and subtle production flourishes. There’s a fragility to the instrumentation that matches the vulnerability in Adeline’s voice. At times, the arrangements feel like they’re teetering on the edge of breaking. The production (all done by Adeline herself) is delicate, warm, and often understated, letting the lyrical content take center stage.

Throughout the album, there’s a persistent sense of longing, self-doubt, and complicated love. The title itself, evil, baby, evil, feels like a kind of tragic refrain: acknowledging darkness (evil), intimacy (baby), and the cyclical tug of both. There’s a feeling that Adeline is grappling with destructive patterns in relationships, both with others and within herself. These are not simple love songs or breakup anthems: they are moments of existential reckoning. She wrestles with identity, with loneliness, with the need for validation, and with the pain of ambition and self-destruction.

1. On “The Club,” she opens with a confession: “we broke up before I went to the club … now we can be friends.” There’s bittersweet humor and heartbreak layered together, she admits needing something physical (“now I need someone to fuck”) while also confronting confusion about her own desires (“I think I like men but I’m still scared of them”) and the way she covers her insecurities (“I tried to cover it up … but it wasn’t enough”). It’s a moment of self-awareness and vulnerability wrapped in a deceptively simple melody.


2. “You Hold Me” is one of the most tender tracks on the album, with imagery of swimming in a “new body” and staying under long enough for everything outside to change. The refrain, “You hold me when my girl is gone,” is repeated in a whisper of longing and gratitude, but there's also a darker undercurrent: Adeline mentions carrying a knife “so I could feel more sane,” suggesting a kind of desperation in the physical act of being held, as if validation can be pried from presence.


3. “Is It Ok” explores the uncertainty of friendship and romance: “is it ok if you're my best friend … if we pretend … say you love me … I’ll wait for you … I can’t let go of anything.” She teeters between hope and resignation. The vulnerability is raw: she’s not sure what the relationship should be, but she knows she’s not ready to let go, even if she fears being lied to again.


4. In “Buried A Gun In The Yard,” she confronts more self-destructive impulses. The repeated line “Because I always get what I want” feels like both a proud assertion and a warning. There’s regret ("I know I'm starting to feel bad"), confusion (“I don’t know if this is right anymore”), and a creeping sense of things spiraling: “You’re really starting to freak me out … I just listen to that song and I think about you … And I don’t like / I like you and I don’t.” It’s one of the more emotionally volatile moments on the record.


5. “No Friends” is short but cutting: liquor, isolation, medical examinations (“they scan my body they scan my brain”), emptiness, and a visceral declaration: “I say I’m sorry I feel nothing.” It’s haunting, a portrait of someone who feels disconnected not just from others, but from themselves.


6. “Family 2” offers a slightly softer, more hopeful tone—but it’s complicated. She imagines a kind of belonging (“if you were in my family … we could be so happy”), prays for togetherness, but also expresses regret and longing (“I just choke it back … I wish you would not have done this”). It’s a vision of intimacy turned inward, a fantasy of what “home” might feel like if love could mend the fractures.


7. “Can You Trace It On My Hand” is raw and punchy: she asks to trace her partner’s hand while she lies “sideways on the bed … breathing in and out.” She reflects on promises (“I thought you said whatever happens we’d figure it out”), on vulnerability (“can you look me in the eye or kiss me on the mouth”), and on uncertainty (“do you think there is anything left for us … if you say you’re still in love … can I just stay the night”). It’s tender and real.


8. The short interlude “Hello World It's Evil Adeline” feels like a late subway ride home. In just over a minute without saying a word, she seems to re-center the listener completely, transitioning us perfectly into the final track of this project.


9. The closing track, “Drugs,” is a bleak yet catchy finale: “we only got time for things that get us off our heads … we can't stop going out … we just keep living wrong … baby do you believe in me… i never give up on dreams … i wanna believe in things and we still got time for it.” Here, Adeline meditates on escapism, regret, and the cost of busyness, the emotional, relational, and self-destructive. It’s a confession, a resignation, and a plea, all wrapped in soft, pulsing production.

Overall evil, baby, evil is a deeply personal journey. Evil Adeline doesn’t hide behind metaphors or abstract imagery, she’s talking about real pain, real longing, and real confusion. But she does it with a kind of poetic restraint that makes every word feel deliberate and necessary.

The album’s brevity is a strength: there’s no filler, no grandiose production, just intimate, unguarded reflections. Listening to it feels like leaning in close to someone who’s whispering their heartache in your ear. It’s both a mourning and a celebration of self -- a testament to someone navigating complex identities, loves, and scars.

In a world that often demands shiny pop perfection, this album stands out for its honesty. It’s not just “sad music”: it’s a reckoning. Evil Adeline captures the messiness of desire and regret, the ache of wanting to belong, and the way we sometimes hurt ourselves in the name of love and self-understanding. evil, baby, evil is a small but powerful piece of art -- a whispered secret in song form, haunting and beautiful in its unflinching clarity.

Favorite tracks: “The Club, "You Hold Me", “No Friends”, "Can You Trace It On My Hand", “Drugs”

January 2026

Listening to In Russia. A is a 9 was my introduction to Exum. I hadn’t listened to any of his earlier work before this album, which meant I entered the project without expectations, without a sonic reference point, and without a sense of who Exum was supposed to be as an artist. In some ways, that made the listening experience feel more disorienting but also more honest. There was nothing to compare it to, no imagined trajectory to measure it against. Just sound, atmosphere, and whatever meaning I could gather while moving through it.

The album itself feels experimental not because it’s loud or abrasive, but because it resists orientation. There’s no obvious emotional anchor at first. Instead, Exum relies on repetition, texture, and restraint to guide the listener through a kind of psychological terrain. Sounds loop until they lose their original meaning and become sensation.

Track 7, Caroline (Snippet)

What’s striking about the album’s sonic arc is how it unfolds. Some of the tracks feel disembodied, almost dissociative. Listening feels like floating between rooms rather than entering one fully formed space. There’s a deliberate flatness to the emotional delivery at the start, not numbness exactly, but emotional suspension. It mirrors the experience of overstimulation: too much input, not enough meaning. The music doesn’t rush to ground you. It just lets you drift.

As the album progresses, subtle shifts begin to happen. The repetition starts to feel less alienating and more meditative. The minimalism stops reading as absence and starts to feel like intention. These shifts aren’t dramatic; they’re almost imperceptible, which makes them feel earned. You don’t notice the album changing so much as you realize you’ve changed inside it.

One thing I noticed throughout the countless times I listened to this album is that Exum treats sound as atmosphere rather than ornament. Percussion often feels secondary to mood. Vocals function less as storytelling devices and more as emotional textures, just another instrument layered into the mix. Lyrics repeat until they blur into mantra, not demanding interpretation so much as presence. This approach makes the album feel immersive rather than declarative. You’re not being told how to feel; you’re being placed inside a feeling and left to navigate it.

The opening track, “Losing Focus,” isn’t a heavy production song, it’s simple, slow, and carries an almost dreadful nostalgic feeling, like the start of a thought you’re not ready to finish. It sets an expectation for the album’s sound: windows down, layered and soft vocals, everything slightly blurred at the edges. BUt that sense of steadiness doesn’t last long. Track 2, “Waking Up” enters with a similar thread in its opening seconds, but then the drums arrive, introducing more percussion, more urgency, gently shaking you out of the trance Track 1 puts you under. Track 3, “Hallelujah” pulls everything back again, stripping the sound down to something raw, choir-like vocals accompanied by the piano, before Track 4, “Hollis Prozac” throws you back into chaos, noise, and movement. Exum moves the listener back and forth between these states, never settling fully into one. Clarity followed by disruption, calm interrupted by tension, setting the emotional rhythm that carries through the rest of the record.

By the time the record reaches its later tracks, the sonic world feels more intimate, more tethered to the body. Melodies linger longer. Phrases feel warmer, even when they’re still unresolved. To me the experimental nature of the album isn’t about pushing genre boundaries in obvious ways, it’s more about pacing, withholding, and trusting subtlety. Exum allows the album to remain unresolved, emotionally and sonically, mirroring the way thoughts and feelings often exist in real life: incomplete, looping, and quietly persistent.

The album doesn’t offer a clean arc from chaos to clarity. Instead, it traces a softer, stranger journey, from disorientation to tentative presence, from abstraction to moments of grounding, without ever fully settling. What initially feels like abstraction reveals structure in retrospect: each song acts as a small pivot in the album’s emotional and psychological movement. As a first encounter with Exum’s work, it feels less like an introduction and more like being dropped directly into the middle of someone’s inner world. It’s an album that asks you to listen with your whole nervous system, not just your ears and once you do, it opens up into something deeply absorbing.

Favorite tracks: “Losing Focus", "Waking Up", “Hallelujah”, "Peace On Earth", “Your Daughter is Awesome”, "Thinking About You"