Olivia Dean may simply have stayed in a single lane for her debut album, “Messy.” She has been on a glide path to a profession in clean English pop-soul. She’s a creamy-toned, jazz-tinged singer and a heartsore however resilient lyricist, grounded in traditional verse-chorus-bridge songwriting.

Dean, 24, has been releasing songs since 2018 — lengthy sufficient to make her first album really feel like a turning level as a substitute of an introduction. It reaffirms what she’s been doing proper; it additionally claims new potentialities.

She was born in London — to a Guyanese-Jamaican mom and an English father — and soaked up music from her father’s album assortment. (Her center identify is Lauryn, after Lauryn Hill.) She sang in a gospel choir and took musical-theater lessons. And like Amy Winehouse, Adele, Leona Lewis, Raye, Jessie J and Imogen Heap, Dean confirmed sufficient youthful expertise to attend the star-making BRIT Faculty of performing arts.

Like different newcomers, Dean gained consideration for a featured vocal with an digital act, performing “Adrenaline” with Rudimental in 2019. She was already constructing her personal songs with collaborators. By now, with a sequence of EP releases and two million Spotify followers, Dean has amassed sufficient followers — amongst them Elton John — to have carried out on the 2023 Glastonbury pageant.

“Messy” makes clear Dean’s pop-soul experience. She offers classic Memphis soul a smooth digital gloss in “The Hardest Half,” a tune she launched in 2020 that has been streamed tens of hundreds of thousands of occasions and reappears on “Messy.” (She additionally launched a remix that has her buying and selling verses with Leon Bridges.) The tune is about understanding — with remorse and aid — that she has outgrown a youthful romance. “Currently I’ve been rising into somebody you don’t know,” she sings. “You had the possibility to like her, however apparently you don’t.”

The album additionally flaunts soul craftsmanship with “Dive,” an opulent, string-topped ballad about giving in to infatuation. The push-and-pull melody exhibits the affect of Winehouse, certainly one of Dean’s apparent fashions. However in Dean’s songs, she often reaches towards constructive considering and self-care as a substitute of Winehouse’s darkish humor.

One other retro soul tune, the Motown-flavored, cowbell-tapping “Women Room,” gives a decidedly post-Motown thought: that whilst a part of a pair, a girl is entitled to independence and time by herself. “I like being in your house/However typically I would like some room,” she explains.

Whereas Dean doesn’t abandon pop-soul, “Messy” determinedly exams different potentialities. The title tune — which permits that just a little imperfection is OK and insists, “I’m in your facet” — approaches psych-folk, with low-fi guitar and piano and apparitional sounds and voices. “No Man” bemoans an emotionally distant accomplice in a moody, time-warped ballad, layering digital percussion and mournful strings. She opens the album with “UFO,” which merges folky strumming with Vocoder-processed vocal harmonies, as Dean performs an alien: “I would like someplace to land/I’d as properly fall into your earthly fingers.”

All through the album, the songwriting stays old-school: easy melodies and lyrics, clear constructions, no jump-cut transitions, not even a visitor rapper. And whereas Dean’s songs consider relatable issues of the center, she ends the album with a declaration of her personal distinct id.

“Carmen” is a tribute to Dean’s grandmother, who got here to England from Guyana within the wave of Caribbean immigration that’s now known as the Windrush era. It’s an upbeat march, with metal drum and carnival horns within the combine. “No technique to know, the best way to make a house/In another person’s motherland,” Dean sings. “You transplanted a household tree/And part of it grew into me.” The tune is as polished as all the pieces else on the album. But it surely’s keen to get just a little private, too.

Olivia Dean
“Messy”
(Island)