In the promotional blitz running up to her third album, “Radical Optimism,” Dua Lipa continuously waxed intellectual about self-realization and the freedom that comes from growth, spurred by situations both good and bad.
“I think it’s important that we just learn to walk through the fire and not hide away from it,” she told Variety in March. “That’s just optimism. It’s probably the most daring thing we can do. Sometimes.”
It’s an ethos she applies to the album at large.
“Optimism” is a blast of pop savvy, imbued with romantic tales of reckless abandon and the trappings and benefits that come with it. But the heady explanations she soldered onto the album in interviews weren’t really necessary; the maturity of “Optimism” speaks for itself, mainly in the production, performance and songwriting, which see Lipa at her most realized.
If her last album, “Future Nostalgia,” was about escapism, then “Optimism” is about confronting the realities that make us who we are, and the often harsh truths that come from it.
Her latest arrives four years after “Nostalgia,” an exercise in disco opulence that landed at just the right time. It was a parachute from the gloom of the pandemic, and much like Lady Gaga’s “Chromatica,” released just two months later, it offered reprieve and comfort in its ebullience, a distraction from the horrors of the world and a reminder that dance music’s remove lived on.
She hasn’t lost sight of what makes dance-pop so compelling on “Optimism,” and only builds on it. Lipa corralled a team of musicians — Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Tobias Jesso Jr., Danny L. Harle — to confect a world unto its own, from the thrust of “These Walls” to the French touch of “Illusion.”
It’s at once satiating and electrifying. Lipa isn’t a ballad artist, or one to infuse her music with the beliefs she shares outside of it. In her newsletter Service95, for instance, she runs a book club, and shares stories of social justice and activism.
But “Optimism” isn’t about any of those things, or how she described the album.
It’s a direct pop record dressed up and perfected in the way that the best pop music does, gussying up the structures and conventions of the genre while ignoring everything outside of it.
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