Dua Lipa is floating in the ocean, the sun just beginning to set behind her. She looks strong, serene - save for the looming threat of a massive shark, fin just breaching the surface a few feet away.
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The image is the cover of her third album, Radical Optimism, released on Friday. It is an apt visual representation for an album about finding and protecting your peace in dangerous waters - a thematic maturation for the Grammy-award winning pop superstar, who has long identified her sound as "dance-crying."
That cheeky term encapsulates the clubby jubilance of her biggest pop hits, but Radical Optimism, with its psychedelic electro-pop, complicates it.
"There's definitely something more cathartic that comes with the third album," she told The Associated Press.
"Future Nostalgia was my chance for me to be able to do a very polished pop-dance-disco record," she says of her 2020 release. Radical Optimism, alternatively, was informed by what she's learned from touring the world over the last few years.
"It was so much more free flowing," she says of her latest album's creative process.
"And it didn't have a formula, per se, but I always had that pop sensibility in the back of my mind. But I wanted to just experiment and try and create something new. But I think this was always kind of the album that I've always wanted to make."
In more ways than one: Around her first album, the British singer wrote that she'd like to work with Tame Impala's Kevin Parker - specifically on her third album. The manifestation worked, and he became a crucial collaborator on Radical Optimism.
"It was almost like something deep down, instinctively, was telling me that it was something earned," she says. "That over time I would be able to go in and work with a creative that I was so inspired by, and to be in a room and learn from him."
As for the album's title: "It's euphoric, it's togetherness," she says.
"Dance music has such a long history of creating such a safe space. And I just want to embody that," she adds.
She's been working hard to get there. Lipa, now 28, began her career at age 15, when she convinced her family to let her move from Kosovo to London, where she was born, to pursue a pop career. She went to school, modelled, and in 2017 released her eponymous debut album with the blockbuster hits New Rules and One Kiss.
Then came the nu-disco electropop of 2020's Future Nostalgia, which solidified her status as one of pop music's biggest players.
In 2022, she founded a newsletter Service95, what she views as an extension of a childhood blog, to "tell stories from all around the world, not solely from a Western lens," she says. It has grown into a website, podcast and book club.
"My day job, which is my music career, which I love, comes with constantly being online. And I think for me, at least now I'm searching for other things, and not doomscrolling on Twitter," she says of her media enterprise.
"At least this way I'm like learning something new about the world. I love having that kind of duality in my life."
Australian Associated Press
