Claude says:Dean Lewis spent years assembling his second album, bouncing between West Hollywood, Nashville, and London with different producers — double the time he took on his debut. Where that first record leaned on romance, The Hardest Love turns inward to death, grief, and his deepest anxieties, wrapped in the same soul-baring pop that made him a name. You picked it up a year after release in August 2023 and ran through it hard that month, then returned to it in scattered bursts through spring 2024, leaning on "Looks Like Me" and "Something To Help."