Songfacts®:

• Breakups tend to produce two kinds of songs: the sort where someone sobs into the piano, and the sort where someone tidies up emotionally, puts the kettle on, and gets on with life. Olivia Dean opted for the second approach when she wrote "The Hardest Part," though the title might suggest otherwise.
• Dean penned the song just after emerging from a relationship; the kind that happens in your late teens when everything feels permanent until, quite suddenly, it isn't.
  
  "I had literally just come out of a really serious relationship that I was in for two years," Dean told Haste magazine. "It felt like closing a chapter and starting a new one. I didn't want to be really sad. I wanted to write a song that had a positive outlook on moving on from someone and growing up."
• The song explores the mixed feelings of choosing personal growth over a partner - she has evolved into someone new, but her ex-partner perceives this change as "becoming someone else" and cannot bring himself to love this new version of her.
  
  I was only 18
  You should've known that I was always gonna change
  
  Dean hasn't revealed the identity of this person.
• "The Hardest Part" was written during Dean's first visit to Copenhagen, alongside producers Bastian Langebaek and Max Wolfgang. Copenhagen-based Langebaek, whose résumé includes work with Nilufer Yanya, Jessie Ware, and Zara Larsson, produced the original recording and continued collaborating with Dean through her debut album Messy and its 2025 follow-up The Art of Loving. Wolfgang, formerly frontman of Wolf Gang, also became a regular partner in her songwriting sessions for her first two albums.
• "The Hardest Part" is the second track on the four-song What Am I Gonna Do on Sundays? EP, released December 4, 2020. Dean described the EP as documenting "the journey of a breakup," with each track taking a different emotional angle.
  
  Dean later included the song on her debut studio album, Messy, released June 30, 2023, nearly three years after the song's original release.
• Dean also recorded a duet version with American soul singer Leon Bridges. Bridges said the track struck him right away: "The first time I heard 'The Hardest Part,' it hit me as a one-listen record. It just has that instant classic feel."
  
  Though the Bridges version was released two weeks before Messy, the album uses Dean's solo original recording rather than the duet.
• The duet version with Leon Bridges became Dean's first appearance on a Billboard chart, reaching #20 on the Adult Alternative Airplay tally in 2023.
• The music video for the original solo version of "The Hardest Part" was released August 6, 2020. The description reads: "For when you're ready to move on."
  
  A 2025 video for the Leon Bridges duet version was filmed in France. It was directed by Lena Bismuth and co-stars actors Kossmann Thomas and Emma Kano.