Dua Lipa

She's well-liked round these parts iirc? Surprising to find there's not already a thread.

Shes just gone to number 1 in the UK and that is an amazing thing indeed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2qgadSvNyU

I've heard some other songs of hers I liked. This is not one of them.

I feel like they've spent a lot of money and time building her up as a popstar and New Rules being a chart-topper is a reward for length of service, it's good but it's far from the best thing with her name on it. I really like the album but it loses points for relegating Last Dance to bonus track status.

is the album good? i liked be the one 2 years ago but new rules does nothing for me and i don't remember much of any of the singles in-between

i like "be the one" but wasn't taken by anything else i've heard so far

the "new rules" vid is cute tho! love the colored robes

i like about half her album a lot but this is not partic good/makes me feel really really old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxLQAuQsOWI

this is a very good album imo

Yeah I've gone back to this a lot more than I expected I would - so much personality and presence in her voice. Compared to something like the utterly bland Zara Larsson album, it's a model of what pop can actually be with a bit of ambition and focus

brief shout out to the "new rules" and "lost in your light" music videos for both being extremely good. i love how "lost in your light" totally embodies what it's like to listen to the song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-AuLm7S3XE

also pop album of the year

yeah this album is so good

I know this is unfair but Bill Maher prevents me from getting into "new rules" :(

why would you let that happen

new rules is great, i think will be a top ten single (and maybe my token pop track) this year for me.

"new rules" is a becky anthem i can get behind.

god every time i hear "lost in your light" i play it five times in a row

really (and unfortunately) such a miracle that this album was not only finally released but also turned out to be stupendous

"lost in your light" has been a stalwart on my jogging playlists this year. the way she sings "i wanna stay riiiiiiiiiiight here all night baby" at the beginning of the final chorus is such a moment

Really glad I clicked on this thread. It has made me revisit an album which I dismissed when I first heard it back in June. I must have watched the Lost In Your Light video 20 times in the last 24 hours. It could well end up being my song of the year. I'm now just taking it in turns to play this album and the new Miguel.

delivery of the year: miguel singing “vivid, vivid”

Ya'll aware of this, right? "New Rules" done mid-80's Italo. Somehow it really works!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLjNTTCVat0

great find!
I've also come around on the Freedo remix on the single.

album is p good thx for the tip. the drop into the chorus of 'new rules' is my favourite musical moment of the year; i feel dumb the extent to which it gets me every single time

lol, those drums are pretty tricky

I'm fully obsessed with her album now. Everything sounds so effortless which is nice compared to some of the other big pop records of the year that sound like way too much hard work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm8rz-llMhE

Haven't heard much about this around here. Already #1 in the UK charts.

I'm still undecided about it but I think it's a step up from IDGAF. Opinions?

As a regular American Top 40 listener it’s very refreshing to have some played-straight, classy, four-on-the-floor house music back on the radio. The first time it came on I briefly thought I’d tuned the station to WBLS by mistake. Don’t know that Dua Lipa feels particularly vital to the success of the record, but by the same measure she acquits herself well.

Man, Calvin Harris is everywhere right now...

i think it's pretty good! a little forgettable, but serviceable for sure

i don't hear too much calvin harris where i am so i'll accept this small dose...

he's no marshmello

i like this a lot better than his fake random access memories songs. IDGAF slander is also insane

we had JD Twitch down to play at Hot Mess on saturday and he played New Rules! or fragments and teasers of it building up to what might have been his own live mix. anyway, it ruled.

that sounds great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4-jOuHO-z4

^I love this, though I can't shake the suspicion that the pitch-shifted bit in the chorus was an attempt to make Dua's voice sound as much like Cher's as possible after Cher declined an invitation to guest on the track

her new single 'Want To' is much weaker imho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwHjeQjY2eA

i like Electricity a lot, probably my favourite single of hers. i wish the outro just jammed on like that for longer though, it feels like there's a whole other song there waiting to be unearthed. interesting that Romy from the xx has a writing credit on it. i'm very curious about the Blackpink collab that's coming up too

wow "Want To" is really awful

https://www.jaguar.com/the-pace.html

romy's had a couple of non-xx writing credits lately, most recently on Kelela's album

lol wtf

@ the jaguar partnership

This was my favourite pop star mag cover for some time, I mean I know it's GQ and everything but the combination of her and 'A billion people can't be wrong' with 'Could Jacob Rees-Mogg get any worse?' is pretty hard to top

https://www.magazinecafestore.com/Upload/Product/81/gq-uk-magazine-may-2018.jpg

lol Gentlemen's Quarterly

New single is out on Friday. It sounds promising:

Miss me? pic.twitter.com/amWaQuhaDy

— DUA LIPA (@DUALIPA) October 22, 2019

"This was my favourite pop star mag cover for some time, I mean I know it's GQ and everything but the combination of her and 'A billion people can't be wrong' with 'Could Jacob Rees-Mogg get any worse?' is pretty hard to top"

I'm really bothered by the way that the question mark at the end of that line pushes past the right border of the text. It looks wrong.

For all those people reading this in 2027, when the image is gone, there was originally a picture of the front cover of the British edition of GQ magazine, May 2018. All of the headlines on the right were right-aligned to a rigid border but the question mark in the last headline, "Could Jacob Rees-Mogg get any worse?", extended over the edge of the border, and in 2019 it bothered me.

In 2027 you will walk through a miniature recreation of London and see a miniature version of yourself.

For those of us reading in 2019, who is Jacob Reese-Whatever?

hideous far right British politician

Got it

https://youtu.be/htg8v0g_4e4

that is a bizarre combo of writers/producers

song is underwhelming, not terrible but it's more 'ok album track' than 'comeback single'

so her new album probably won’t be the “British Lemonade” I’m guessing

Great production and the last minute is really cool, but the chorus just isn't strong enough. Hoping it'll grow on me like Dance The Night did.

The stuff 'dis hyped releases' threads were made for

Somehow I was expecting something completely different because she had mentioned that that the new album was going to be 70s psychedelia-inspired. I don't even know what that means but I can't hear any 70s or psychedelia in this track. Sounds more like it has elements from a very specific era circa the early 80s.

I do think it is excellent, though. Much better than Dance The Night.

when the hell is her new album coming out????

Love the vocoder outro, wish it went on for another minute in that vein.

"Houdini" did grow on me a little but the new one is a more successful collaboration between the same artists. Still not wowed but a good song

both of the new tracks aren't awful but they're so.... rote

Don’t mess with the formula

Yeah not feelin this one at all.

plods the same way as tame impala's poor forays into disco, letting him be a pop producer was a mistake

"Radical Optimism" out May 3

1. end of an era
2. houdini
3. training season
4. these walls
5. whatcha doing
6. french exit
7. illusion
8. falling forever
9. anything for love
10. maria
11. happy for you

"A couple years ago, a friend introduced me to the term Radical Optimism. It’s a concept that resonated with me, and I became more curious as I started to play with it and weave it into my life," Lipa says in the announcement. "It struck me – the idea of going through chaos gracefully and feeling like you can weather any storm. At the same time, I found myself looking through the music history of psychedelia, trip hop, and Britpop. It has always felt so confidently optimistic to me, and that honesty and attitude is a feeling I took into my recording sessions."

radical optimism - like the hope Dua Lipa stans have that the album will still be good after the two singles that have come out??? *ba-dum-psssh*

I'm still holding out hope *wipes tears*

Damn, that is such a Dua Lipa Podcast Host album title.

It's kinda quiet in her ...has no one listened to the album yet?

Or do people no longer care about Dua Lipa? :(

I don't think it's out yet

I mean I definitely don't care enough about Dua Lipa to seek out leaked files

Me neither.

I just assumed some people here got early access to releases.

I fully expect it to be pretty good, okay, toe taps a little, and then when I’m finished I’ll never feel the need to hear it ever again for the rest of my life. Hope I’m wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dua_Lipa#2023%E2%80%93present:_acting_debut_and_Radical_Optimism

the album "was released on 3 May 2024." which is tomorrow.

future nostalgia

granted i'm in america but i feel like there is zero hype for this, didn't realize it was about to drop until now

I think her music feels like generic radio stuff now, even if it didn't always. I even hear other artists copping stuff from her, like having a group of girls shouting "Yeah yeah yeah."

She's on SNL this weekend. Maybe that will stir some buzz.

well she has released a series of retread singles that are essentially objectively not as good as the singles from the previous record. so it feels like a 1+1=2 situation to me

there's been a weird disconnect with the rollout where she has cited a bunch of british rock bands as influences but the audience is just hearing a replay of her last 'era'... i wonder if the album will reveal a tension between the single choices & the album tracks that makes her framing of it make more sense

i don't think the singles really felt that much like retreads - they very much sound like they're produced by kevin parker - but they're a definite step down

listening now the first track is really nice, much better than the singles

i'm kinda expecting that all the talk about being influenced by primal scream is just referring to like, the shuffling percussion in the background of "houdini"

None of the songs touch the highlights of the previous album for me, but I enjoyed my first listen. It's a little bit more all-over-the-place than I expected; after the first track I thought the through line might've been...Moloko or fin de siècle William Orbit or something, but it's less balearic than that. "Falling Forever" reminded me of a Eurovision song!

I predict it will do well across Europe, but absolutely nothing in the US.

She should've sung on the Mdou Moctar album.

"maria" sounds like "island in the sun" lol

i definitely like the tracks where it's trying to sound like moloko more than the ones that sound more obviously like tame impala

this is pretty solid, there's no real duds, but it's never really great either. i agree about it likely doing well in europe but flopping in the usa

yeah agree with that. a number of solid tracks here, particularly the closer (which really starts and ends like 10cc)

"Illusion" is still a dud though

ufo, I mostly agree with that. There aren't weak songs here, but apart from End Of An Era which I love there's nothing that touches the best moments on Future Nostalgia. I think it could grow on me after a few listens. I really like how lush and chilled out it is.

it's probably more solid as an album than future nostalgia which bizarrely fell off in the last few tracks, but it doesn't reach the same highs. i'm frustrated though because there are some good ideas that they didn't lean into enough

Meh. On first listen has none of the charm and a fraction of the hooks of Future Nostalgia.

I predict it will do well across Europe, but absolutely nothing in the US.

Sounded to me like a (flawed?) attempt to appeal more to a US “real songs” market IMO. But maybe I don’t know what I’m talkin’ ’bout.

This album isn't any more uneven than the last one. "End of an Era" is at least as much a banger as "Physical."

i like this album just fine, I think she has a solid catalog

yeah, the new album doesn't feel like a quality drop.

hands down my favorite pop star. great voice, terrible dancer, super lovable, great songs.

This album isn't any more uneven than the last one. "End of an Era" is at least as much a banger as "Physical."

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

I'm really hooked on End of an Era at the moment. I especially love the "I've lost all my senses, la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la" bit. It's one of my favourite songs she's done.

I'm really surprised by the negative reaction this is getting online. I saw a few people call it her Solar Power which is just cold. Maria is the only one I'm not totally sold on at the moment. Even the singles have grown on me.

I'm wondering which single will be put out next. I can't really see a big Levitating moment on here.

she's my favorite recording artist of the past six years, and if people who fixate on whether a record hits #1 or not crow that she's fallen off? well I've never been hung up on fucking charts anyway and so this record is fantastic… like, it seems like chart obsessives really like math or sports, or beyhive or swifties or little monsters and people like that are really into "we're #1" triumphalism, which seems to me to be contrary to, like art and creativity and dancing and songs concerned with romance and pleasure.

I will say that she has a really interesting vocal —or pronounciative— quirk on this record… she pronounces "err" or "Urr" as "oyy": so you have "forev-oyy" instead of forever, or "nay-choyy" instead of nature.

‘Cursive singing’ is inescapable – but is it any goyidd?

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/05/cursive-singing-vocal-trend-pop-music

The sudden onboarding of this technique by Ms Lipa, of whom I am normally a big fan, has made the new record a challenging listen for me.

thought this record was pretty all right when it came out. then the weather changed, and now i’m *loving* it

i like it so much more as a whole than future nostalgia, and i think the production here is the most natural home for her vocals, their total lack of subtlety just works with the production's simultaneous intricacy and breeziness, like going to the beach in the middle of a breakup. the optimal ratio of knotty funk to big feelings. walking around in the sun to this record was a freaking blast