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Dua Lipa Future Nostalgia' Album Review

Dua Lipa's second album Future Nostalgia shows she is not a one-hit wonder. The album mixes sounds from different eras to make new postmodern sound collages. It touches on many genres and references past artists while still sounding contemporary. The album is instantly accessible with catchy songs about relationships but also addresses feminist issues.

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201 views6 pages

Dua Lipa Future Nostalgia' Album Review

Dua Lipa's second album Future Nostalgia shows she is not a one-hit wonder. The album mixes sounds from different eras to make new postmodern sound collages. It touches on many genres and references past artists while still sounding contemporary. The album is instantly accessible with catchy songs about relationships but also addresses feminist issues.

Uploaded by

RS123
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Dua Lipa’s Here to Stay

Craig Jenkins@CraigSJ Mar. 27, 2020

With Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa easily beats both the Best New Artist
curse and sophomore slump. Photo: Tommaso Boddi/WireImage

The Grammy for Best New Artist is something of a curse. It’s keen on
capturing artists in a breakout year but not so good at guessing what
happens next. For every good call — like the Beatles winning in 1965, or
Mariah Carey in 1991, or Adele in 2009 — there’s another that veers
left. Betting on the conscious hip-hop collective Arrested Development
after the 1992 smashes “People Everyday” and “Tennessee” was smart;
there was no way to tell there weren’t any more big hits in the well.
Lauryn Hill was a sure bet in 1999, but we still haven’t seen a sequel to
:
Miseducation over 20 years later. The logic in picking Evanescence over
50 Cent in 2004 proved shaky in just three years. Fun won in 2013 and
went on hiatus. Megan Trainor was recognized in 2016 but has yet to
top the run of ubiquitous singles from her debut album Title.

Dua Lipa, 2019’s Best New Artist, is playing the long game. Born in
London to parents who emigrated from Kosovo before the war in the
’90s, the singer-songwriter grew up determined to pursue a career in
music. Lipa left home alone at 15 to seek out opportunities in London, a
few years after a job offer brought the family back to the Kosovar capital
of Pristina. She shacked up with a friend and made smart use of
developments in streaming and social media, posting videos of herself
performing covers of her favorite artists. (You can see raw talent in old
footage of Lipa singing “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child and “No One”
by Alicia Keys.) Assembling a makeshift family miles away from her
biological one, while grinding in the service industry for work, gave Dua
Lipa a message about friendship and perseverance that bleeds into her
writing and glossy videos. Studying pop, dance, and rap music gave her
a natural ear for hits.

2017’s Dua Lipa came on like a tropical depression, building slowly to a


tipping point where no one could escape the winds. “New Rules” and
“IDGAF” rank among the most ecstatic kiss-off records in an era that
produced haymakers like Rihanna’s “Needed Me” and Beyoncé’s “Sorry.”
Lipa is flanked in her videos by a detail of women standing in solidarity
against whatever lonesome beau blew his chance. The sentiment has
resonated powerfully. “New Rules” is only the second song by a woman
to crack a billion streams on Spotify. Dua Lipa is the only woman listed
in the service’s top 20 most-streamed songs of all time. She won her
Grammy over a formidable crop of nominees including newly minted
:
country-radio star Luke Combs; Bebe Rexha, whose Florida Georgia Line
collab “Meant to Be” topped Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart for a
year; and gifted singer-songwriters like H.E.R. and Margo Price. Dua
Lipa hasn’t taken this windfall for granted. Work on a sophomore album
began during the tour for the self-titled debut.

This week’s Future Nostalgia is fair notice that Dua Lipa’s no one-album
wonder. Like the Weeknd’s New Wave and synth-pop throwback After
Hours, Nostalgia plays with sounds and samples from different eras but
rarely falls prey to kitsch or hero worship. The building materials are
familiar, but mixed and matched, they make new, slick, postmodern
sound collages. The single “Physical” pairs a somber synth-pop groove
with lyrics that nod to Olivia Newton-John’s MOR workout anthem of
:
the same name and a chorus whose melody carries more than a passing
resemblance to Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude.” “Love Again” mixes ’70s
disco strings, 21st-century nu-disco production, and a bit of “Your
Woman,” British-Indian artist White Town’s Marxist alt-dance hit from
1997. “Break My Heart” recasts the memorable riff from INXS’s “I Need
You Tonight” as rubbery bass; “Levitate” revels in funky guitars,
handclaps, and talk-box vocals.

This mix of multigenerational points of reference and modern


sensibilities is a result of smart planning. Alongside the first album’s
wingman Stephen “Koz” Kozmeniuk, Nostalgia’s long list of collaborators
includes Stuart Price, who notably produced the majority of Confessions
on a Dance Floor, Madonna’s stellar middle-aughts love letter to house
music; hip-hop regulars Jeff Bhasker and Take a Daytrip; and pop hit-
makers Tove Lo, Julia Michaels, and Justin Tranter. Together, they
attempt to make a timeless record by touching every demographic.
When they’re not bogged down by the obviousness of their influences,
they make a reasonable pass at scoring one of the best pop albums of the
young year.

Future Nostalgia calls its shot in the title track, which name-checks John
Lautner, American inventor of the Googie style of architecture, a brand
of space-age futurism — think The Jetsons — that scans to modern eyes
as both iconic and specific to the mid-20th-century past. (Get it? “Future
nostalgia”?) It’s bold to promise your album will have legs in the first 30
seconds, but if you follow pop fans and frequented pop-friendly
establishments since last fall’s release of the killer lead single “Don’t
Start Now,” you’ve been living with this music for months already. The
songs are all sturdy; they have to be when the predecessors to this sound
are transatlantic dance-pop titans like Kylie Minogue and Madonna.
:
As a writer, Dua Lipa is a straight shooter. Lautner line aside, Future
Nostalgia is instantly accessible, a volley of tunes about falling for
someone or kicking someone else to the curb. Fans of “New Rules” will
delight in the snooty glee and self-sufficiency of “Don’t Start Now” and
“Good in Bed,” a song about a physical attraction to a hot idiot that
recalls the plaintive vocal and dismissive lyrics of Lily Allen’s “Smile.”
The songs about crushes are euphoric. “Cool” is a worthy successor to
the cheery Jonas Brothers and Gwen Stefani songs it shares its name
with. “Levitating” and “Pretty Please” are flurries of pickup lines the
singer knocks out of the park by conjuring anxiousness and sexual
tension in her vocal delivery.

Album closer “Boys Will Be Boys” is the purest expression of everything


:
Dua Lipa has been saying about feminism in her music and in public
speeches like her 2019 talk at Cambridge University on the value and
contributions of women in music or the quip in her Grammy acceptance
speech directed at the former Recording Academy president Neil
Portnow, who said women need to “step up” if they want fairer
representation at award shows. “Boys Will Be Boys” voices experiences
men don’t worry about, the fear of walking home alone at night, the
frustration of being talked over and treated as intellectual lessers, and
the burden of hiding these discomforts. At the end of a record that
delivers a second serving of the light, curt, breezy tunes that catapulted
Dua Lipa to international notoriety, “Boys Will Be Boys” says she’s only
scratched the surface of what she’s capable of.
:

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