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Romance is a blast on Dua Lipa’s third album, “Radical Optimism.” It’s a thumping, reverberating, woofer-rattling, arena-scale sensation, one thing to exult in even when it doesn’t all the time go proper.
On Lipa’s first two albums, she juxtaposed flirtations and breakups with ideas about energy and gender. “I do know you ain’t used to a feminine alpha,” she sang within the title observe of “Future Nostalgia” in 2020, and she or he denounced male entitlement in “Boys Will Be Boys.” But on “Radical Optimism,” all that’s at stake is coupledom: sizing up one another, testing the probabilities, envisioning permanence or — surprisingly graciously — letting go. Her new songs deal with single life as an journey sport stuffed with ups and downs, however not as cataclysmic or tragic.
Lipa, 28, has by no means bothered with subtlety. She goals for — and normally achieves — full-fledged bangers. There’s all the time an underlying confidence in her agency alto voice, and she or he has a present for large, blunt, immediately legible pop hooks, the type that sum up a state of affairs in a terse refrain. “I’m not right here for lengthy/Catch me or I’m going Houdini,” she calls for in “Houdini,” one of many album’s prerelease singles, creating an open-voweled, singable shorthand for making her escape.
With “Future Nostalgia,” Lipa was an early mover in what grew right into a pandemic-era disco revival. That album and others (from Jessie Ware, Doja Cat, Kylie Minogue, Roisin Murphy and Lady Gaga) would summon a communal clubland expertise that had been shut down in 2020 and was sorely missed.
Four-on-the-floor beats and snappy funk bass strains proceed to drive Lipa’s tracks on “Radical Optimism,” which opens with “End of an Era,” a tune a couple of membership meet-up that may simply be the fitting one. “Is this my completely happy ending?” Lipa wonders amid cooing backup vocals, and she or he goes on to rap, “Another woman falls in love/Another woman leaves the membership.”
Lipa’s collaborators on “Radical Optimism” embrace Danny L Harle — who has simply moved from the self-conscious hyperpop of PC Music to creating shiny, up-to-the-minute mainstream pop — and Kevin Parker, who creates era-melding grooves as Tame Impala. The productions attain again to the larger-than-life sounds of the Eighties, when hitmakers like Madonna and Michael Jackson commanded a pop monoculture with superhuman performances: singing, dancing, appearing in movies, without end poised and strategic.
Lipa shares that degree of ambition. She has made it her enterprise to be directly technical and bodily, choreographed and carnal. Even in a way more fragmented pop panorama, her songs are constructed for a mass viewers. The tracks on “Radical Optimism” are lavishly maximalist. They mingle glossy programmed sounds and opulent dwell ones; bass, percussion and acoustic guitars convey a human contact, at the same time as they’re surrounded by sci-fi synthesizers and metronomic beats.
It’s an album of nonstop ear sweet. “Training Season,” her demand for a companion who already is aware of “easy methods to love me proper,” has tickling guitar syncopations and girl-group harmonies coming out of nowhere. “French Exit,” by which Lipa decides to vanish as an alternative of going by means of a laborious breakup — “Goodbye doesn’t harm if I don’t say it” — laces a sputtering beat with playful, elusive instrumental cameos: finger cymbals, flute, handclaps, string-section swoops.
“Falling Forever” harks again to disco-era dramas like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” however flips the tone to constructive pondering. It summons thundering drums as Lipa savors a blissful connection, belting “How lengthy can it simply preserve getting higher?”
And “Happy for You” is a post-breakup tune that radiates absolution for all concerned. The singer sees her ex with a brand new girlfriend — “I feel she’s a mannequin” — and as an alternative of jealousy or remorse, she’s overjoyed that all the things labored out. “Even the exhausting components have been all for the perfect,” she decides, and her voice leaps up — above double-time drums, swirling backup vocals and cavernous bass tones — as she realizes, “I should have cherished you greater than I ever knew,” directly self-congratulatory and unburdened.
There’s immense self-discipline and energy behind the songs on “Radical Optimism,” and Lipa flaunts her work within the studio and in her effortful onstage dance routines. But she additionally brings a decided lightheartedness to her new songs, in some way managing to not take them too critically. Romance may be all-encompassing and all-important within the second. But if it doesn’t work out, she is aware of she will be able to transfer on.
Dua Lipa
“Radical Optimism”
(Warner Records)
