’Radical Optimism’ review: Feeling pessimistic about Dua Lipa’s latest

Dua Lipa should be bigger than she is right now. In fact, if you had asked me how confident I was that Dua was going to be one of the biggest pop stars on the level of, or perhaps even bigger than Taylor Swift, I would have bet all the hair on my head. I recently shaved my head, and Dua Lipa just released her third full-length album, Radical Optimism

Radical Optimism doesn’t really feel like the album that’s going to shoot Dua Lipa into the level of stardom that she deserves. As I listened to it over and over again, I tried to really understand why. Radical Optimism follows a handful of other big recent releases that have reinvigorated the conversation surrounding the mainstream pop stars, all of whom are powerful women who have each brought their own thing to the table. In the last two year, there has been glamor pop rock from Olivia Rodrigo with GUTS, a genre-defining country album from Beyoncé with Cowboy Carter, and an expose on Taylor Swift by Taylor Swift in The Tortured Poets Department. 

As Radical Optimism releases alongside the efforts of Dua Lipa’s contemporaries, I can’t really see what it brings to the conversation right now. Much of that has to do with Dua Lipa’s previous project, Future Nostalgia, which for all intents and purposes is a timeless project that had done what several albums would go on to do years later — it challenged and changed the landscape.

Future Nostalgia was admittedly slept on by this writer. However, it managed to succeed in raising just about every expectation and challenged every opinion Dua Lipa’s fans and dissenters had about her. The disco inspirations found in sprinkles in her first self-titled album were now the main formula on her second outing, with the essences of Donna Summer, ABBA and the Bee Gees sprinkled into tracks like “Don’t Start Now” and “Break My Heart.”

It’s true that the classic sounds of disco had been long dead by the time Future Nostalgia dropped in 2020, but several elements of disco had morphed and taken new shapes across several different genres (hip-hop and punk to name the biggest benefactors). Dua Lipa wore disco proudly on her sleeves with her second album, leaving behind much of the bombastic, ballad-like synths of her last and replacing them with funky, dance-floor ready rhythms and insanely catchy choruses. Again, this was all still present in her debut LP, but Future Nostalgia turned up to eleven — disco was back, baby. 

As someone who grew up with a limited view of disco, this wasn’t really my soul train to hop on. But to be fair, I wasn’t even listening to that much pop music at the time. When I say she should have been bigger though, that’s an opinion I likely would have felt strongly about even back then. Especially during the Future Nostalgia era. 

Dua’s debut proved that she could compete with the biggest pop stars at the time, clubs were blasting “New Rules” after “Wild Thoughts,” and “IDGAF” occupied the same “Sad Summer” playlists as “Look What You Made Me Do.” Future Nostalgia did more than play the game though, it changed it. Upon finally listening to it at the beginning of last year, it’s genuinely one of my favorite pop albums of the 2020s and even beyond.

It did such a great job at capturing everything that made disco popular — the funky Motown inspiration, the glossy, poppy beats and aesthetic — but Dua kept it modern at the same time with Europop and electropop beats layered throughout. The eponymous track on the album features a Daft Punk-ish electronic voice in the background as Dua sings on a roller rink beat about changing the pop game for crying out loud.

With Radical Optimism, Dua Lipa didn’t keep it a secret that she wasn’t trying to make “Future Nostalgia 2,” and that’s honestly the most exciting thing I could have heard coming off of the high that album gave me. The last thing I wanted was for Dua Lipa to tread previous ground with her next effort. Well, we don’t always get what we wish for, no matter how optimistic we are about it.

It’s true that Dua Lipa does dilute a lot of the disco influence found in previous ventures, in my opinion, she mostly left behind a lot of the funk. Radical Optimism starts off strong with “End of an Era,” softly bidding farewell to nightclub party time Dua and saying hey to psychedelic summer Dua. “End of an Era” has a really funky beat and sounds a bit like “Lucky Star” by Madonna with some record scratches and other contemporary touches that make it feel modern.

The next song, “Houdini” takes the UK dance vibe even further with traces of dance-pop, electropop and psychedelia. It starts off with this really groovy, almost glitch-like synth and drum intro that carries throughout the entire song. Dua reminds us of how incredible she is at making a catchy and danceable chorus with “Catch me or I’ll go Houdini” bound to get stuck in your head. But after this impressive introduction, the album dissolves into a number of similar sounding and honestly half-hearted beats.

At its best, Radical Optimism features songs like the aforementioned that sound pretty similar to the offerings Dua Lipa gave us in Future Nostalgia. Singles that I originally really enjoyed like “Illusion” and “Training Season” felt a bit tiresome after hearing the samesy sounding songs that surround them. They’re all pretty standard club bangers that might have turned heads a couple of years ago, but feel kind of stale and basic in the current pop music climate. Perhaps even worse, Radical Optimism somehow sounds more dated than Future Nostalgia did, despite the latter supposedly being dedicated to celebrating disco’s past. Radical Optimism sounds like it borrows a bit too heavily from the glitzy-glamorous disco pop era of the ‘80s to the point of the songs just sounding a lot like songs of that era rather than bringing any modern spin to it.

There’s no song like the “Levitating” remix on Radical Optimism, which saw an already impressive crowd dance bop transform into a Fresh Prince style disco/hip-hop phenomena. The funkiness of Future Nostalgia is hardly present in Radical Optimism, and the neo-psychedelic electro that was supposedly replacing it just isn’t strong enough throughout the whole project. Beyond some pretty inventive riffs and intros here and there, it just doesn’t dive into the idea of blending the many inspirations behind this album the way Dua did before. 

Lyrically, Dua Lipa is about as basic and non-descriptive as many of her contemporaries, as the current state of mainstream pop music seems to be to just write out loosely specific poems about ex-lovers, but this has never really been a problem in the past. Future Nostalgia is full of basic lyrics that don’t dive deep into the personal lore of the songwriter; much of Taylor Swift’s lore, for example, comes less from the deepness of the lyrics and more from how deep you are in your parasocial relationship with Tay-Tay.

As it has been since I could walk on both legs, pop lets the music talk first, and sometimes the lyrics can have a say if they behave. Though both albums are fairly lacking in the lyric department, none can deny how much fun it feels singing along to Future Nostalgia songs while jamming to those infectious grooves, and I just don’t feel that with Radical Optimism. It feels like Dua is toying with these inspirations like she did with disco initially on her first album, when I think I was just expecting her to go all in the way she has before. 

Radical Optimism is out now.

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Images courtesy of Warner Records U.K.