Dua Lipa’s third album is almost here. She’s been teasing a new era since November, when she debuted “Houdini,” the first single from the long-anticipated project. In March, after weeks of speculation, she revealed the album title: Radical Optimism, which finally drops on Friday.
Lipa first shared details about the album when she spoke at length with Rolling Stone for a cover story that was released in January. Here is everything she told us about her new music and what we can expect from her Radical Optimism era.
She started working on new music in 2021
It took a while for Lipa to launch her Future Nostalgia tour, so she had time in between to start thinking about her next move. “I was like, ‘I might as well get back in the studio and start working on a new project,'” she said. “And for me, I just have to write a lot until I get my idea.”
She did end up writing quite a lot… 97 songs in fact. Obviously most of what Lipa wrote for the album ended up on the cutting room floor, especially the songs written before she launched her tour. For Lipa, the album didn’t really begin until she put Kevin Parker, Danny L Harle, Tobias Jesso Jr. and Caroline Ailin in a room together. Those four ended up being her primary collaborators on the album — she refers to as her “band” — and ended up working on eight of the 11 songs.
The lyrics chronicle her experience being single
Though Lipa seems to be happily coupled up with actor Callum Turner now, she had gone through a massive break-up in the middle of writing Radical Optimism. She and model Anwar Hadid called it quits in 2021, right before she went on tour. By the time her “band” started working together in July 2022, Lipa had started to date again. As Lipa recalled in the RS cover story, she would come into sessions the morning after a date, armed with stories that inspired songs like “Training Season” and “Illusion.”
“Dating, I think overall, is just a little confusing,” she admitted of her experience. “It’s either through friends of friends or people you trust where you can meet new people, because [dating] is not really so straightforward when you are, I guess, a public person.”
She’s moved on from her heartbreak
At least two songs hint at the end of her long-term, highly publicized relationship with Hadid. One of them is an “evolved” look at the break-up, from the perspective of someone who has not only moved on but who is also happy to see her ex has done so as well. She goes so far as to compliment her ex’s new relationship, calling his new girlfriend “really pretty,” and she finds peace as he moves forward: “I must have loved you more than I ever knew.… I’m not mad/I’m not hurt/You got everything you deserve.”
“When you have a feeling like that one, you feel really grown because you’re like, ‘Oh, whoa, I’m such an evolved human being that I can see my ex move on and feel good about it,’” she explained, adding that this was a new for her. “I think I’ve had breakups in my life where I felt like the only kind of breakup you could have was when things just ended really badly. Things ending in a nice way was such a new thing.… It taught me a lot.”
The sound of the new songs is inspired by Primal Scream, Massive Attack and Nineties Britpop
Lipa’s third LP is a tribute to UK rave culture as well as the psychedelic extended remixes she would hear on the radio late at night while driving around London.
“This record feels a bit more raw,” she explained. “I want to capture the essence of youth and freedom and having fun and just letting things happen, whether it’s good or bad. You can’t change it. You just have to roll with the punches of whatever’s happening in your life.”
Drake attends a game between the Houston Rockets and the Cleveland Cavaliers
Earl Sweatshirt Is Right: ‘Don’t Worry’ Is a Great Drake Song
Even the staunchest Drake hater can probably name at least one song that does it for them. For better or worse, Aubrey Graham has spent nearly two decades giving voice to the millennial subconscious more skillfully than any mainstream musician not named Taylor Swift, soundtracking the fears, insecurities, and romantic delusions of a generation raised on reality-TV melodrama and the first wave of social media’s main-character ethos. It should come as no surprise, then, that Earl Sweatshirt, underground rap’s poet laureate, has singled out the deep Iceman cut “Don’t Worry,” singing the song karaoke-style to close out his recent live sets. The track is the purest distillation of Drake’s appeal since the Take Care era, and a quiet reminder of why it’s hard to imagine him going away any time soon.
In the clips, which first started circulating around late May, during Earl’s Home on the Range Tour with MIKE on the heels of their Surf Gang-produced project Pompeii // Utility, it’s the song’s final turn that has Earl & Co. the most hyped up. “I just wanna see that boy beg on the pavement,” Drake coos, the type of revenge fantasy he’s built a career out of conjuring. Drake goes on. “I just wanna see that boy struggle with the phone bill,” he sings, getting specific. “The light bill/That’s how I feel.”
It’s PhD-level pettiness with a weirdly relatable spin. One must know the more treacherous depths of being broke to pinpoint the humiliation of struggling with the phone bill, and here Drake is wishing such luck onto anyone “trippin’ with the gang.” Whereas his entire catalog is fueled by this kind of anonymous sense of betrayal, it hits harder here. You can feel the sting of 2024’s rap beef in the glee with which Drake sings his imagined get-back, landing on an infectious melody all while basically giving a speech you’d expect from the Joker. “I might just get that boy hit for entertainment,” he sings.
This is classic Drake, turning the darker inner thoughts most people would be ashamed to admit into something almost beautiful. He is, in a way, rap’s Lena Dunham, finding art on the other side of cringe.
More recently, clips of Earl singing the song at the end of different tour stops — an ongoing bit at this point — went viral thanks to the never-ending stan wars between Kendrick and Drake fans. Some, unable to deny Earl’s bona fides as a rapper, assumed the whole thing must be an act of trolling, while others saw it as proof that Drake “won” the beef. The third option, of course, is that it’s a really good song, the type Drake is especially skilled at making.
At the height of the beef, like any millennial amidst a friend-group falling-out, Drake appeared to be rewatching The Sopranos, posting pictures from the show to his Instagram Stories. (Iceman’s hit single “Janice STFU” samples Tony Soprano uttering the infamous phrase to his sister, Janice.) “Don’t Worry” has the Machiavellian feeling of a classic mobster flick, a resolve for vengeance at any cost. A desire to see your enemies suffer. Across an entire album, it’s a mood that can feel heavy, but you’ve got to admit, when it hits, it hits. And that’s why Drake remains a fixture within not just hip-hop, but pop culture at large. He reconstructs embarrassingly human impulses as irresistible melodies. “Don’t Worry” might very well become the sleeper hit from Iceman, as clips from Earl’s concerts have already started to boost the song’s presence across feeds.
As he often does, Earl Sweatshirt simply speaks the truth.