The image is the cover of his third album, Radical Optimism, which goes on sale May 3. It’s a fitting visual representation for a record 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 dance).
That ironic term encapsulates the joy of nightclub of his biggest pop hits, but Radical Optimismwith its psychedelic electro-pop, complicates it.
“There’s definitely something more cathartic coming with the third album,” he recently told The Associated Press.
Future Nostalgia It was my opportunity to make a very polished pop-dance-disco album, based on his second release of 2020. Radical Optimismfor its part, was based on what he has learned from touring 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 said 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 came true, and he became a crucial collaborator of Radical Optimism.
“It was almost as if something deep down, instinctively, told me that it was something I had earned,” he said. That in time I would be able to come in and work with a creative who inspired me so much; be in a room and learn from it.
Regarding the title of the album: It’s euphoric, it’s union, plant. Dance music has a long history of creating a very safe space. And I just want to embody that.
xito de Dua Lipa
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 dance-pop hits. New Rules y One Kiss. Then came nu-disco electropop Future Nostalgia of 2020, which solidified her status as one of pop music’s greatest performers. Not bad for a unique voice in the age of streamingwhere capturing the attention of the masses, and maintaining it, is a major challenge.
In 2024, his pop songs contain a kind of learned elasticity. The melodies are stacked on top of unusual synth sounds, the vocal range is extended (particularly on the cut Falling Forever), the dance touches, inspired by the rave culture of the United Kingdom and artists who previously fused diverse styles such as Primal Scream and Massive Attack, are elements that Lipa says she would not 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 many opinions in the room, including her own,” Jesso told the AP. She doesn’t value hers above anyone else’s, she simply uses the ones that work best for what she is trying to achieve.
“We were a band,” Lipa said 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. And I loved that version of myself, she noted. The third day, the post-disco pop of Whatcha Doing. In spacious, bright studios in London and Malib, they refined what would become Lipa’s most ambitious and euphoric album to date.
Service95
In 2022, he founded a newsletter called Service95, which he considers an extension of a childhood blog, to tell stories from around the world, not just from a Western perspective. 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 great,” she said, 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 explained 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 about reports of children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo missing cobalt for iPhones.
“That was scary and really exciting,” he said. 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 to students in a conversation moderated by Drew Barrymore.
“One of the things I admire about her is how incredibly smart she is,” Barrymore said in her introduction, praising Lipa for not just being a cone, but for being someone who is globally aware.
In conversation, Lipa was generous and warm, particularly with a first-year theater student named Dolce, who is also of Albanian origin, and expressed her desire to succeed in the entertainment industry. Lipa told him that her identity, intentionally or not, is woven into her music.
At the end of the event, Lipa expressed that she feels optimistic about life in general. “I am the most optimistic about the next generation.
FUENTE: AP
