Olivia Dean lands WSJ. Magazine Fall Women's Fashion cover

The record, produced with Zach Nahome, explores love in its many forms and includes the singles "Nice To Each Other" and "Man I Need." Her debut album, Messy, earned a Mercury Prize nomination and established her as a leading voice in neo-soul and pop. On August 26, 2026, The Wall Street Journal Magazine confirmed Dean as the cover star of its Fall Women's Fashion Issue, with an in-depth interview conducted by Elias Leight, according to a press release from Dow Jones.

Dean is candid about that period. "I was terrible," she says in the interview. "I was just along for the ride, and owning that I had no clue what I was doing, but I think I brought a good vibe." "I was in every single session you could possibly be in, turning up to studios in London with absolute strangers four or five days a week, and just writing song after song after song. A lot of them were terrible," she recalls. Dean says she used to worry that certain lyrics were too personal, only to discover that those were the lines fans mentioned most often. "You get kind of addicted to that feeling," she continues. "It's almost like the danger of it: Will I be brave enough to say it?"

Dean recounts meeting Wonder the night before an awards ceremony and shaking his hand while he sang along to her hit "Man I Need." "I was just like, OK, that's the only thing I need for the rest of my life. If I ever read a comment where someone's like, 'She's rubbish,' well, Stevie Wonder said that I wasn't," she says. The song later became the highest charting song from a UK act on Spotify's Global Charts that year and reached the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100, according to her official website. Dean is currently promoting her sophomore album, The Art of Loving, released the previous September.

The conversation revisits Dean's early days in the music industry, starting with her first real job in 2017 as a backing vocalist for the electroni...