Dua Lipa: Radical Optimism album review — regressions on a dance floor

Has Dua Lipa, in the words of one of her previous hits, done a full 180? The advance word on her new album suggests so. Apparently the Londoner immersed herself in the histories of psychedelia, trip-hop and Britpop while making it. Primal Scream, Massive Attack and UK rave are among the influences she cites. But Radical Optimism turns out to be less radical than that.

Opening track “End of an Era” finds Dua losing “all my senses” amid trippy chimes and a 1990s drum break. But she hasn’t lost them to the extent of abandoning the style that has brought her vast success. Despite talk of bidding farewell to disco — her contribution to last year’s Barbie soundtrack, “Dance the Night”, was supposedly the end of that chapter — a very disco-adjacent bassline rings out as her third studio album gets under way. Lyrics about falling in and out of love in nightclubs reinforce the theme. It seems the singer hasn’t managed to prise herself from the dance floor after all.

There are pragmatic reasons for that. Her last album, Future Nostalgia, was a huge global hit after its release in 2020. It has notched up more than 12bn Spotify streams, among the most for an album in the platform’s history. Her debut, 2017’s Dua Lipa, ranks just above it. Not many pop stars are so radically optimistic about their fanbase’s allegiance that they’ll rip up a formula that isn’t broken. Hence the business-as-usual motor that lies within the shiny new chassis of Radical Optimism.

The album is a succinct 11 tracks. Collaborators include Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, mainstream pop’s favourite psychonaut, and former PC Music producer Danny L Harle. Their fingerprints can be detected in the electronically processed guitar solo in “Houdini” (Parker) and the annoyingly squiggly acid-house sounds in “Maria” (Harle). 

There’s a lot of production layering and effects, but the songs share a similarly straightforward groove. Dua Lipa moves through them with aplomb, singing in her huskily expressive voice. “Training Season” is a dance-pop standout, at once feathery and impeccably supple. Others, however, come across as filler (“These Walls”) or generic (the Cher-channelling Europop of “Falling Forever”). “Don’t you know I could do this dance all night?” she cries in “Illusion”. The bigger illusion here is an album that claims to mark a change in direction but instead does the same as before, only less notably.

★★☆☆☆

‘Radical Optimism’ is released by Warner Records