Dua Lipa is floating within the ocean, the solar simply starting to set behind her. She seems sturdy, serene – save for the looming menace of an enormous shark, fin simply breaching the floor just a few ft away.
The picture is the duvet of her third album, Radical Optimism, out Friday. It’s an apt visible illustration for an album about discovering and defending your peace in harmful waters – a thematic maturation for the Grammy-award-winning pop celebrity, who has lengthy recognized her sound as “dance-crying.”
That cheeky time period encapsulates the clubby jubilance of her largest pop hits, however Radical Optimism, with its psychedelic electro-pop, complicates it.
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“There’s undoubtedly one thing extra cathartic that comes with the third album,” she advised The Related Press lately.
“Future Nostalgia was my probability for me to have the ability to do a really polished pop-dance-disco document,” she says of her 2020 sophomore launch. Radical Optimism, alternatively, was knowledgeable by what she’s discovered from touring the world over the previous few years – drawing affect from journey hop and Britpop and together with newfound curiosity in reside instrumentation.
“It was a lot extra free-flowing,” she says of her newest album’s inventive course of.
“And it did not have a method, per se, however I at all times had that pop sensibility behind my thoughts. However I needed to simply experiment and attempt to create one thing new. However I feel this was at all times sort of the album that I’ve at all times needed to make.”
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In additional methods than one: Round her first album, Lipa wrote down that she’d wish to work with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker – particularly on her third album. The manifestation labored, and he turned an important collaborator on Radical Optimism.
“It was nearly like one thing deep down, instinctively, was telling me that it was one thing earned,” she says.
“That over time I might have the ability to go in and work with a inventive that I used to be so impressed by, and to be in a room and be taught from him.”
As for the album’s title: “It is euphoric, it is togetherness,” she says.
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“Dance music has such an extended historical past of making such a secure house. And I simply need to embody that,” she provides.
She’s been working exhausting to get there. Lipa, now 28, started her profession at age 15, when she satisfied her household to let her transfer from Kosovo to London, the place she was born, to pursue a pop profession. She went to high school, modelled, and in 2017 launched her eponymous debut album with the blockbuster dance-pop hits New Guidelines and One Kiss.
Then got here the nu-disco electropop of 2020’s Future Nostalgia, which solidified her standing as one among pop music’s largest gamers. Not unhealthy for a singular voice within the streaming period, the place capturing the eye of the lots – and sustaining it – has by no means been extra of a problem.
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In 2024, her pop songs include a sort of discovered elasticity.
The melodies stack atop uncommon synth sounds, the vocal vary stretches (notably on the minimize Falling Endlessly), the dance breaks impressed by UK rave tradition and format-benders Primal Scream and Huge Assault – they’re all components Lipa says she would not have dared try on her final album.
That got here from working with Parker, producer Danny L Harle, songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr. (identified for his work with Harry Types and Adele ), and Lipa’s longtime collaborator Caroline Ailin.
“She understands how you can deal with numerous opinions within the room, together with her personal,” Jesso tells the AP.
“She would not worth hers above anybody else’s, she merely makes use of those which work greatest for what she is attempting to realize.”
“We had been a band,” Lipa says of the group.
The primary day they wrote Phantasm. The second day, Completely satisfied for You. (“I would by no means written a track like that earlier than,” she factors out. “And I beloved that model of myself.”)
The third day, the post-disco pop of Whatcha Doing. In vivid, ethereal studios in London and Malibu, they finessed what would turn out to be Lipa’s most bold – and euphoric-sounding – document to this point.
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That experimentation seems throughout Lipa’s endeavours, too.
She’s performing extra – “little child roles!” she says with a smile – after enjoying Mermaid Barbie within the blockbuster Barbie (she additionally contributed the ever-present, Grammy-nominated track Dance the Night time to the soundtrack) and LaGrange, a sultry spy in Argylle (a short efficiency AP movie critic Jake Coyle described because the film’s greatest couple of minutes).
In 2022, she based a e-newsletter known as Service95, what she views as an extension of a childhood weblog, to “inform tales from all around the globe, not solely from a Western lens,” she says.
It has grown into an internet site, podcast and ebook membership: “It is simply one other interest of mine that I’ve by some means managed to show right into a job, which is simply nice,” she says, smiling.
“My day job, which is my music profession, which I like, comes with continually being on-line. And I feel for me, at the very least now I am trying to find different issues, and never doomscrolling on Twitter,” she says of her media enterprise.
“At the least this manner I am like studying one thing new in regards to the world. I like having that sort of duality in my life.”
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It is a duality fueled by curiosity, like when Lipa made headlines late final yr for difficult Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner in an interview on her podcast over reviews of kids within the Democratic Republic of Congo mining cobalt for iPhones.
“That was scary, and actually thrilling,” she says. “You by no means actually know what to anticipate if you go in to interview somebody.”
Just a few days after visiting the AP’s New York headquarters, Lipa seems at a public highschool on the Higher East Facet of Manhattan to talk to college students in a dialog moderated by Drew Barrymore.
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“One of many issues I like about her is how extremely clever she is,” Barrymore says in her introduction, commending Lipa for not solely being an “icon,” however somebody who’s “globally conscious”.
In dialog, Lipa is beneficiant and heat, notably to a freshman drama scholar named Dolce, who can also be Albanian, and expresses a want to make it within the leisure trade. Lipa tells her that identification, deliberately or not, is woven into her music.
On the finish of the occasion, Lipa says she feels “optimistic about life total, all the pieces that comes with it,” and takes a second to look out on the viewers.
“I am essentially the most optimistic in regards to the subsequent era.”
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After which, nearly as swiftly as she arrived, Lipa leaves. A lingering positivity permeates the air. It recollects one thing she advised the AP earlier within the week: that she strives to be “violently glad” in life and in her endeavours.
“You typically need to push your self into that feeling,” she says. Remaining grateful is “undoubtedly a muscle that must be exercised.”
On Radical Optimism, she’s written the exercise soundtrack.
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