Dua Lipa floats in the ocean, the sun beginning to set behind her. She looks strong, composed, except for the looming threat of a huge shark, with one fin that has just surfaced a few meters away.
The image is the cover of his third album, “Radical Optimism”, which goes on sale this Friday. It’s a fitting visual for an album about finding your own peace and protecting it in dangerous waters, a thematic maturation for the Grammy-winning pop superstar, who has long identified her sound as “dance-crying.” crying).
That tongue-in-cheek term encapsulates the clubbing joy of their biggest pop hits, but “Radical Optimism,” with its psychedelic electro-pop, complicates it. “There’s definitely something more cathartic that comes with the third album,” he recently told The Associated Press.
“’Future Nostalgia’ was my opportunity to make a very polished pop-dance-disco album,” he says of his second release of 2020. “Radical Optimism,” for its part, was based on what he has learned from his tours. around the world in recent years, with influences from trip hop and Britpop, and including a new interest in live instrumentation.
“It was much more fluid,” he says of the creative process for his most recent album. “And I didn’t have a formula, per se, but I always had that pop sensibility in the back of my mind. But I just wanted to experiment and try to create something new. “I think this was always the album I always wanted to make.”
In more ways than one: Around her first album, Lipa wrote that she would like to work with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, specifically on her third album. The wish was granted, and he became a crucial contributor to “Radical Optimism.”
“It was almost as if something deep down, instinctively, told me that it was something I had earned,” he says. “That eventually I could come in and work with a creative that inspired me so much, and be in a room and learn from him.” As for the album title: “It’s euphoric, it’s togetherness,” she says. “Dance music has a long history of creating a very safe space. And I just want to embody that,” she adds.
Lipa has worked hard to get there. She is now 28 years old and began her career at 15, when she convinced her family to let her move from Kosovo to London, where she was born, to pursue a pop career. She went to school, modeled and in 2017 she released her self-titled debut album featuring the dance-pop hits “New Rules” and “One Kiss.”
Then came the nu-disco electropop of 2020’s “Future Nostalgia,” which solidified her status as one of pop music’s greatest performers. Not bad for a unique voice in the streaming era, where capturing the attention of the masses, and keeping it, is a major challenge.
In 2024, his pop songs contain a kind of learned elasticity. The melodies are layered on unusual synth sounds, the vocal range is extended (particularly on the cut “Falling Forever”), the dance touches, inspired by UK rave culture and artists who previously fused diverse styles such as Primal Scream and Massive Attack, are elements that Lipa says she wouldn’t have dared to try on her new album. That came from working with Parker, producer Danny L Harle, songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr. (known for his work with Harry Styles and Adele) and his frequent collaborator Caroline Ailin.
“She (Lipa) understands how to handle a lot of opinions in the room, including her own,” Jesso told the AP. “She doesn’t value hers above anyone else’s, she just uses the ones that work best for what she’s trying to achieve.”
“We were a band,” Lipa says of the group of creatives. The first day they wrote “Illusion”. The second day, “Happy for You” (“I had never written a song like that before,” she notes. “And I loved that version of myself.”) The third day, the post-disco pop of “Whatcha Doing”. In spacious, bright studios in London and Malibu, they refined what would become Lipa’s most ambitious and euphoric record to date.
That experimentation also appears in Lipa’s efforts. She’s acting more — “little baby roles!” she says with a smile — after playing mermaid Barbie in the box-office hit “Barbie” (she also contributed the Grammy-nominated song “Dance the Night” to the soundtrack from that film) and played LaGrange, a sultry spy in “Argylle,” her brief performance being called by AP film critic Jake Coyle the best minutes of the film.
In 2022, he founded a newsletter called Service95, which he sees as an extension of a childhood blog, to “tell stories from around the world, not just from a Western perspective,” he says. It has become a website, a podcast and a book club: “It’s just another hobby of mine that I’ve somehow managed to turn into a job, which is just brilliant,” she says, smiling.
“My day job, which is my music career, which I love, comes with being constantly online. And I think, for me, at least now I’m looking for other things, and not wasting my time watching non-stop content on Twitter,” he says of his media company. “At least this way I’m learning something new about the world. “I love having that kind of duality in my life.”
It’s a presence fueled by curiosity, like when Lipa made headlines late last year for challenging Apple CEO Tim Cook in an interview on his podcast over reports of children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo mining cobalt for iPhones. “That was terrifying and really exciting,” he says. “You never know what to expect when you go to interview someone.”
A few days after visiting AP headquarters in New York, Lipa went to a public high school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to speak with students in a conversation moderated by Drew Barrymore. “One of the things I admire about her is how incredibly intelligent she is,” Barrymore says in her introduction, praising Lipa for not only being an “icon,” but for being someone who has “global consciousness.” .
In conversation, Lipa is generous and warm, particularly with a first-year theater student named Dolce, who is also of Albanian descent, and expresses her desire to succeed in the entertainment industry. Lipa tells him that her identity, intentionally or not, is woven into her music. At the end of the event, Lipa says that she feels “optimistic about life in general, everything that comes with it,” and takes a moment to look at the audience. “I am the most optimistic about the next generation.”
And then, almost as quickly as she arrived, Lipa leaves. A lingering positivity permeates the air. This echoes something she told the AP earlier in the week: that she strives to be “violently happy” in life and in her endeavors. “Sometimes you have to push yourself into that feeling,” she says. Being grateful is “definitely a muscle that needs to be exercised.” In “Radical Optimism,” she has written the soundtrack to do that exercise.