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?”
Of course, despite Lipa’s well-touted business acumen (her own production and management company; media-empire ambitions), it’s not her job to boil Radical Optimism down to the elevator pitch. So what is it? The album opens with a sensual invitation in “End of an Era,” a psychedelic, Avalanches-style candyland about kisses driving you mad that sounds convincingly lightheaded—but it then leaves Oz never to return. For all the Britpop chatter, it’s actually a strikingly European-sounding record, for good and bad, made primarily with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Danny L Harle, “New Rules” co-writer Caroline Ailin, and Tobias Jesso Jr. In that Time interview, Lipa said that as far back as her debut, she hoped she would one day be “deserving” enough to get in a room with Parker. Before you ask, she did manifest it—but more important is what you do once you get there.
Considering the pedigree of its personnel, Radical Optimism is oddly incoherent. The absence of Future Nostalgia’s many topline writers is notable both in the lack of ironclad melodies and unfamiliarity with how to handle Lipa’s vocal weaponry. This results in leaden thumpers like the bell-ringing Euro-pop of “Illusion,” in which Lipa taunts some other sap who thinks he can outmaneuver her. It climaxes in a primary-colored synth burble: filter house stripped of the filter, French touch gone heavy-handed.
A handful of songs reach for ABBA’s wounded-but-persistent pride and golden songcraft: “Training Season” has the vigor of a “Lay All Your Love on Me” or “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”; “These Walls” the bittersweet valediction of “The Winner Takes It All.” But as with much of Radical Optimism, both songs are brutally overstuffed and desperately in need of breathing space. Parker (absent on the latter) has a taste for clutter, the rhythm section always firing like pistons, and the too-vigorous effort grounds Lipa’s gift for airborne fantasia.
A few songs even wade into Eurovision-worthy schlager. “Happy for You” welds a vulnerable sentiment about Lipa’s benevolence towards her ex and his new girlfriend (“She’s really pret-ty/I think she’s a model”) to a gaping, cavernous breakbeat that provides a strange big-tent conclusion to an album with an otherwise busy affect. Similarly, “Falling Forever,” which swaps Parker for the other “New Rules” co-writers Ian Kirkpatrick and Emily Warren, is a bizarre assault, with Lipa yodeling “how loooooooooong” against galloping drums. Both are almost as odd and awkward as anything off Rina Sawayama’s Hold the Girl, as individual songwriting choices and within the context of the album—although I wouldn’t be surprised if they were written with the climactic fireworks of her impending headline set at Glastonbury in mind.
It’s not that Lipa and her collaborators can’t make unusual sound clashes work. Two standout songs are elegantly odd, as uncanny yet comforting as the memory of that one foreign radio hit that dominated a great holiday. The understated “French Exit” splices a Café del Mar acoustic guitar refrain amid skittish flute runs and conversational verses, and climaxes in a sophisticated, string-laden kiss-off and one of the album’s best choruses. (Lipa has a taste for spoken-word interstitials in her stiffest R.P., but her almost mournful “filer à l’Anglaise” finishes the song like a drop of good olive oil.)
And “Maria” ditches Parker, brings in Andrew Wyatt and Julia Michaels, and makes especially good on Harle’s involvement. He co-produced Caroline Polachek’s Pang and Desire, I Want to Turn Into You; the latter did bravura things with the influence of British and continental pop from the early 2000s. “Maria” dabbles in the pacy acoustica of French DJ Bob Sinclair’s “Love Generation” and Alizée’s “Moi… Lolita” as Lipa sings a paean to her lover’s ex for making him the man he is today. “Faintly Sapphic fixation with the other woman” is a well-worn pop trope by this point, but the force of Lipa’s cries in the chorus—“Maria!/I know you’re gone/But I feel ya/When we’re alone”—resounds with a curiosity and emotional richness that’s all but absent elsewhere.
To hear Lipa talk about Radical Optimism is to hear her talk about weathering chaos gracefully; or as the cover puts it very literally, keeping your cool while swimming in shark-infested waters. But most of the lyrics are about dodging depth rather than diving in: outsmarting advances, clean breaks, clean hands, no mess. The lover-on-the-lam vibe belies the sentiment of “Anything for Love,” a scrap of a song that mines Janet Jackson at her sweetest as Lipa laments a time when “we used to do anything for love”—a romantic notion not particularly in evidence here. Similarly, the half-baked lyrical conceit and unconvincingly winsome tone of “These Walls”—as in, “If these walls could talk, they’d tell us to break up”—positively shrugs as a relationship meets its death knell.
The Cher cosplay of “Whatcha Doing” is another inadvertent reveal: Late at night, Lipa debates making her move on a guy she likes but worries about ceding her power. “If control is my religion,” she sings, somewhat mixing her metaphors, “then I’m heading for collision.” She decides against the approach, able to imagine them together in the future but not right now. It’s telling: The overthought Radical Optimism puts Lipa so many steps ahead she’s hard to make out. Her tight grip reveals an empty hand.
