Dua Lipa: Radical Optimism

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Dua Lipa is a pop star who stridently resists personal disclosure in her work. This added an irresistible biographical quirk to "Houdini," the hard-edged, darting lead single of her third album. As she often does, Lipa was challenging a guy to impress her before she gave him the slip. Lipa herself is an elusive presence, which isn't to say she's reclusive. Although it's been four years since her second album Future Nostalgia, the British Albanian-Kosovar 28-year-old has remained omnipresent thanks to various luxury brand campaigns and the contractually attendant magazine covers, roles in Barbie and Argylle, her podcast and book club, and the album's pandemic-delayed tour. Despite that visibility, she appears glamorous, distant. It's quite admirable that she refuses to trade on her private life for intrigue, especially when celebrity subtext has never been a more powerful driver of pop success. At the same time, it's hard to decipher what she stands for as an artist, and harder than ever on the confused Radical Optimism.

Lipa's 2017 self-titled album was the sound of a young pop star coming into focus. A long-gestating grab-bag of thrusting nightclub staples seared by her white-hot burn of a voice, it finally took flight when the sisterly video for "New Rules" turned an album track into a whopping hit (and seemingly just in the nick of time to avoid being sent to guest-vocalist purgatory). It bought her the right to become an artiste on the focused Future Nostalgia, which transmuted the sounds of Lipa's '90s youth, the playfulness of the Spice Girls and the funkiness of Jamiroquai, into weightless disco reverie. Hers was the first major lockdown promotional campaign, and you wonder whether COVID curbed the lifespan of these lusty bops by depriving them of their natural dancefloor dominion, or in fact cultivated it, giving them a lasting power no marketing team could have dreamt of.

Going by the curiously opaque, even defensive press that led into Radical Optimism, you begin to suspect the pandemic did a fair bit of the heavy lifting. Of her new album, Lipa, er, divulged to Time recently, "I'm just a different person, so of course this record is going to be different. I have different thoughts, wants, needs, and perspectives." Go girl, give us something? She's bristled at the entirely accurate notion that "Houdini" has anything to do with disco; elsewhere in the promotional word salad, she has spoken frequently of the inspiration of Britpop and the energy and experimentation she hears in the likes of Primal Scream and Oasis. But listening to Radical Optimism with Britpop in mind might recall the Arrested Development bit in which Michael Bluth is forced to ask, "Has anyone in this family ever seen a chicken?"