The return of Dua Lipa It is a conglomerate of good ideas that are not entirely well developed. A piece that fails to reflect a truly creatively productive stage for the artist and that has loaded her with hateful comparisons with her predecessor. Bounded by a few well-defined pop songs, “Radical Optimism” It gives off a kind of feeling of instability, brakes and lack of cohesion that makes you not fully enter and not fully connect with it.
It’s an album of good vibes, sunburnt synthesizers, vacations and carelessness about life. An album full of pompous arrangements – and that does not have his best lyrics –, built hand in hand with Kevin Parker (Tame Impala) and Danny L. Harle. Dua Lipa He takes the vacation of his dreams on a pop wave to which we are already accustomed. A bad trip that moves a little away from the disco obsession that it entailed “Future Nostalgia”despite the fact that this essence is still very present in topics such as “Houdini”; and all the elaborate work of perfection, care and maturity that his previous delivery conveyed on this occasion disappears. “Radical Optimism” seeks more to find the freshness and laboratory game of the debut. It is a chaotic album since, despite being a fairly short project for what usually comes out today, the final decision of the songs included in the album and how they feed off each other are not fully understood. Even so, to also highlight the good, we must recognize that the false simplicity that the proposal sometimes presents becomes a real “guilty pleasure” and makes the best songs of the album enter a loop in your personal playlist and become addictive despite having completely forgotten all the others.
Dua’s talent for making good pop is overflowing and when she wants she knows where to play to remind you. However, the main problem of “Radical Optimism” lies in the listener’s attempt, and even the need, to search beyond what we already know about the artist herself after having touched the sky with “Future Nostalgia.” In trying to make us believe that this album, as its author herself said, is a project of rave inspiration from the nineties and psychedelic blood that we honestly find difficult to find. There is certainly little of that here, in fact, as we said before, it is an album that is born from the shadow of the pop perfection achieved and that luckily sometimes generates good moments like the funk push of “Whatcha Doing” or the vocal growth of “Falling Forever” under a somewhat more house aura. And there aren’t many hidden gems to obsess over beyond the singles, which until now we could define as the best of the album. We like to think, of course, that everything could have been very different if the start-up Mediterranean energy that was born in “End Of An Era” It would have illuminated the rest of the proposal much more, giving it greater identity and would not have been cut short as has ended up happening.
We knew Dua had a huge challenge to overcome with this release. On the other hand, it is exhausting to see that whole narrative of demand once you are branded as a pop star in which you are subject only to perfection and having to prove to the masses that you are up to the standard that they decide you to be. Dua is not like that, she does not want that responsibility, she does not seek to be the queen of the charts at all costs. She is a commercial figure yes, but she is not afraid to show her weak points and risk it if she is making the music she wants. She experiences the industry in a different way, she navigates pop and she does so by going without a filter on a recurring basis to all those sound spaces in which she enjoys and in which she feels safe. We assume that for the next album she will have to take a new turn. The disco and eighties fashion is leaving, EDM is rearing its head in a strange way again and we are sure that all that raver speech that she intended to put on this album is still growing in her head. What we cannot say is whether the new decisions will once again satisfy the demands of all those who ask for a constant pop anthem, demand success without giving the star any respite and even cancel it if it does not meet expectations.
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