Rarely do British pop girls go global. While the Jess Glynnes and Anne Maries of the mid-2010s have found sustainable success on the UK arena circuit and the Capital FM A-List, seeing
Dua Lipa fly beyond the borders of the island with 2020’s ‘
Future Nostalgia’ was quite the anomaly.
Her self-titled 2017 debut album could’ve left her in that decade, if it wasn’t for the last-ditch attempt to get a hit out of it with the release of ‘
New Rules’ that summer, turning Dua’s career right around. Doubling down in 2018, her Calvin Harris collaboration ‘
One Kiss’ solidified her place as a summer playlist mainstay, but still, the neo-disco bangers that ‘Future Nostalgia’ brought forth two years later felt completely unexpected.
Maybe it’s because of that second album left-turn and its subsequent world domination when it was finally toured in 2022 that left people expecting more from Dua’s follow up, or maybe ‘Future Nostalgia‘'s hyper saturation made ‘
Radical Optimism’'s blissed-out euphoria feel – to some – like a step back, but either way, the bottom line is that Dua is a master of doing the unexpected.
This time around, working with a tight team of Danny L Harle, Kevin Parker, Caroline Ailin and Tobias Jesso Jr almost exclusively, Dua creates an album that’s brighter and breezier than its predecessor. There’s the flourishes of modern psychedelia promised without being overpoweringly obvious; lead tracks ‘
Houdini’ and ‘
Training Season’ hum with Tame Impala synth signatures and bass grooves, elevated by Dua’s airy head voice and smoky tones in equal measure.
