The album was titled after a style of reggae music known as lovers rock, noted for its romantic sound and content, which frontwoman Sade Adu listened to in her youth.

It has since been certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), having sold over 3 million copies in the United States by February 2010.

[4][5][6] Following the release of Love Deluxe, the band took an eight-year hiatus, during which Adu came under media scrutiny with rumours of depression and addiction, and later went on to give birth to her first child.

[9] Mike Pela helped with the co-production of the album and its recording, Andy "Nipper" Davies served as the assistant engineer and Tom Coyne mastered Lovers Rock.

[9] The album's recording and themes were inspired by Adu's experiences during the previous decade, particularly of how she had become preoccupied with the complexity of other people's lives and extremely unhappy.

With the songs intimately fixated on the themes of love, loss and rejection, her delicate phrasing, delivery and deft use of repetition often imbues a deeper meaning than the lyrics themselves suggest.

Unlike Sade's previous work, Lovers Rock did not contain saxophones or instrumentation, but instead spare, deceptively simple arrangement—sometimes no more than an acoustic guitar.

[10] Lovers Rock was seen as offering a more stripped-down, subtle backdrop than the band's previous work, and the album's production saw the use of modern dance beats and reggae.

[10] The album opens with the lead single "By Your Side", a hymnlike song that received comparisons to "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and "No Woman, No Cry".

"[14] "Immigrant" is backed by hip hop beats, and explores racial tensions with lyrics including, "Coming from where he did/He was turned away from every door like Joseph/To even the strongest among us/That would be too much.

[16] "By Your Side" was released as the lead single from the album and was nominated for the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, but lost out to Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird".

[34] James Hannaham of Spin found Lovers Rock "demo-like in its simplicity" and praised its "airy" tones, dubbing the album "ephemeral".

[32] In a review for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield wrote that the album "sounds exactly like Sade, heavily influenced by Diamond Life with a bit of Love Deluxe thrown in.

"[26] In a more mixed review, Q considered Lovers Rock less memorable than Sade's "past triumphs", but highlighted the "refined ache and minimalist chic" of certain songs.

[31] Revolution said that the band had not taken "a gigantic creative leap forward", assessing Lovers Rock as an "acceptable soul album for the adoring Sade fan".

[39] Lovers Rock debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 with 370,000 copies sold in its first week, marking the largest first-week sales of 2000 by a British artist in the United States.

[47] All tracks are written by Sade Adu, Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale and Paul S. Denman, except where notedCredits adapted from the liner notes of Lovers Rock.