British singer-songwriter Olivia Dean has announced a headline performance in Sydney this November 20: An Evening At The Fleet Steps, a one-night-only outdoor show set against the harbour at Mrs Macquaries Point. GET PRE-SALE ACCESS HERE.

Presented by Handsome Tours, Laneway Presents, Fuzzy, and Botanic Gardens of Sydney, the show arrives in tandem with a turning point in Dean’s artistic trajectory. Following her 2023 debut Messy, Dean’s ascent has been one of rare clarity. Shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, nominated for three BRITs, and most recently tapped to soundtrack the next Bridget Jones film (Mad About The Boy), she’s managed to walk the line between viral popularity and critical reverence without losing her footing.

Dean’s music resists easy classification, marrying soul, pop, and classic singer-songwriter structures with diaristic detail and featherlight production. Tracks like ‘The Hardest Part’ and ‘Dive’ gave listeners a front-row seat to her inner world, while live performances, from Jools Holland’s Hootenanny to Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, have affirmed her quiet magnetism. That emotional generosity continues on her recent single ‘Nice To Each Other‘, a gentle ode to early intimacy that lands somewhere between daydream and confession. “Don’t know where the switches are, or where you keep the cutlery,” she sings, turning the mundane into something fragile and full of hope.

As she prepares to release her second album The Art of Loving this September, Dean is shifting the lens closer. The record, she says, deepens her lifelong study of love – not the spectacle of it, but its smaller, more ordinary textures. “I think there’s a whole spectrum of how you can have relationships with people in your life and still make them really meaningful and honest,” she says. “But that’s a new thing for me, to be honest.”

In an era where emotional shorthand is often the norm, Olivia Dean’s insistence on sincerity – however messy, however tentative – feels almost radical. An Evening At The Fleet Steps promises to be a rare moment of connection between an artist in full bloom and the people who’ve grown with her music.