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Dua Lipa covers both US and UK editions of Rolling Stone magazine











Full cover story article can be read here

Some interesting bits about the album:

“This record feels a bit more raw,” she says. “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.”

The album didn’t take shape until after the second leg of her yearlong tour was over. The exact date — maybe it was June? Lipa’s brow furrows as she tries to remember, and because she needs to be precise, she jumps off the orange couch we’re sitting on and walks toward the seemingly normal, white brick wall next to us. It turns out it’s actually a secret doorway to her bedroom.

“It’s so heavy,” she groans, struggling to pry it open. But she returns holding a thick notebook that she purchased from CVS that’s covered in abstract, absent-minded Dua doodles. The pages are filled with notes and handwritten lyrics, and she flips to the date in question — July 2022 — which is when she first met Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. “I was so nervous because I’m just such a fan of Kevin’s,” Lipa says.

Parker, she remembers, “was quite shy in the beginning.” She invited him to a session with three other people she had been working with that summer: her longtime collaborator Caroline Ailin, who co-wrote “Don’t Start Now” and “New Rules,” electronica auteur Danny L Harle (Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX), and folky-pop balladeer Tobias Jesso Jr. (Adele, Niall Horan). Putting these four disparate musical personalities together was a risky gamble that paid off.

“After a while, we all just loosened up together,” Lipa recalls. By the end of the first day at London’s 5DB, the group had “a really good” song. By the end of the week, they had three. “I remember thinking it was a genius move to get that combination of people together,” Parker says. “Like, hats off to her.”

Lipa refers to this particular group as her “band”; they ended up making eight of the 11 tracks on the album. Outside of Ailin, everyone was mostly new to her. She admits that she had been apprehensive about letting new people into her orbit: “As things get bigger, you get more scared to open up and be vulnerable and sit down in a room and just speak from the heart,” she says.

According to Ailin, they “always started with the truth.” Lipa would arrive to sessions with Ailin, Harle, Jesso, and Parker, armed with stories from the night before, chronicling the often-ridiculous ride that is dating in your mid-twenties.

The final product is uniquely and utterly Dua Lipa: confident dance pop full of witty Instagram-caption-ready one-liners. A lot of the songs are playful scenes from clubs or nights out with friends; the lyrics toggle from warnings that she’ll make a fast escape to optimism about what a first kiss could become. There are no sweeping ballads, though there is one good ballad fake-out that blooms into a more buoyant Carole King- and Fleetwood Mac-inspired moment. Mostly, this album is straightforward pop bliss, not unlike her approach to Future Nostalgia.

Lipa doesn’t talk about her love life in depth. People will have to look to the music to get a sense of her private thoughts: One song juxtaposes light harmonies with a tumultuous portrait of a relationship coming to an end: “We call it love but hate it here/Did we really mean it when we said forever?” she sings. But another highlight — one of Lipa’s favorites on the record — is all about maturity and healing. The dreamy, midtempo track plays out like an updated take on Gwen Stefani’s “Cool.” In the lyrics, she compliments her ex’s new relationship, calling his new girlfriend “really pretty,” and she finds peace as he moves on: “I must have loved you more than I ever knew.… I’m not mad/I’m not hurt/You got everything you deserve.”
“Dua really enjoyed that,” Harle says. “Dua likes going to a rave.” (This is true: “I love being on the dance floor, and being the first on the dance floor if nobody else is dancing,” Lipa says.)

For the sound on the album, she thought back to British club culture and the type of carefree abandon she feels when she’s on the dance floor. Lipa’s collaborators helped unlock that energy: She met Harle at “the afterparty of an afterparty of a show” through Andrew Wyatt, who co-wrote Lipa’s first single, “New Love,” as well as her Barbie hit. Wyatt and Harle had done stuff for Polachek, who opened for Lipa’s tour. They’d also worked with a less-expected collaborator that piqued Lipa’s interest: former Oasis singer Liam Gallagher.

Other inspirations came from Lipa’s upbringing in London: The mixes that played late in the evening on Radio 1 were a huge guide; that’s where she first heard some of her favorite Primal Scream remixes, which eventually led her to their 1991 LP, Screamadelica. And in addition to Oasis and Blur, she found herself turning to more of the Nineties rock and electronica acts she grew up listening to, like Moby and Gorillaz.

As raw and loose as the album sounds, Lipa’s process was painstakingly detailed. The collaborators call Lipa a “meticulous” editor who rewrote every line until she felt it was perfect. “Her editing is brutal,” Parker says. The lead single, “Houdini,” for example, took months to get right. “I’d kind of recoil in horror and go, ‘Oh, no, it’s a great verse!’” Parker says. “But then an hour later, we’d have something that I can’t imagine not being in the song.”

“I don’t think there’s a single song on this record that I didn’t go back and want to rewrite and perfect and change and work on it a bit more and dig a little deeper and see if we could go any further,” Lipa admits. But her method worked: Every single one of the collaborators raves about the chemistry and the cohesiveness Lipa engineered.

“Everyone was going, ‘Is this normal? This feels too good to be true,’” Jesso says. “It’s the pinnacle of my writing career. There’s nothing you could get better than that.”

The truth is, you can’t be as ambitious and precise as Lipa is without giving a f***. “I really care about how the fans respond,” she says. (After “Houdini” was released, she was frustrated that people said it still sounded “disco” when none of her influences come from there.)

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about what the critics thought.… When you put your heart and soul into something, you want people collectively to be like, ‘Oh, it’s changed sonically, and it’s been something different.’”

She’s noticed a pattern with all of her singles so far, how they don’t start at the top and “gradually grow” over time. “They take so long and never get to Number One, but they stay around for a long time,” she says. There’s no irritation or anger in her voice when she says this; while a Number One in the U.S. would be nice, the longevity feels like a hard-earned win.

“As long as the songs stick around and people are listening to them, I’m cool with that,” she says.