WORTH A LOOK?: ***1/2

TRACKLIST: End Of An Era; Houdini; Training Season; These Walls; Watcha Doing; French Exit; Illusion; Falling Forever; Anything For Love; Maria; Happy For You

Next month Dua Lipa headlines the Friday night on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival and this album appears very much to have been written with that career-defining moment in mind.

• Read on for reasons including why this is exactly the sort of album she needs under her belt to make Glastonbury successful

Last summer things couldn’t have looked brighter for the English/Albanian singer/songwriter when her song Dance The Night was featured in hit movie Barbie and topped the charts in the UK, Ireland and Belgium while going top 10 in the all-important US.

Last weekend she co-hosted influential US comedy show Saturday Night Live as this 3rd album was released but its sidestep away from the electronic dance music for which she is best loved to tip a toe into the waters of Britpop and psychedelia has been less well received.

We saw her live at Brighton’s Dome in 2017 and at London’s 02 in 2022 and said of the latter: ‘What next? Future Nostalgia was a real step on from her debut and the superstar collaborations have only buffed Lipa’s star brighter. As she rides high above the crowd in a crane that makes good on her Levitating promise and the arena is showered in glitter, we’d like Lipa’s songwriting to progress to the point where we get a better feel of what makes her as an artist tick.’

Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin co-wrote final track Homesick on Lipa’s self-titled debut album and so the Glastonbury gig – Coldplay headline the Saturday night at the Pyramid this year – was not unexpected but we would like to have seen a little more soul-baring on Radical Optimism.

Lipa has released 3 singles from this 3rd LP already with latest Illusion boasting a Barcelona-shot video and 2nd Training Season being a song of the week for us. We said of it: ‘Think of the hyped-up energy of last single Houdini, add the freneticism of Metronomy‘s insistent throb of Love Letters and mash it up with a sports-themed lyric starring a lover who could do better and you might come close to Training Season.’

The live instrumentation and emphasis on guitar rather than keyboards means there’s a warmth to the music which is welcome when much of Lipa’s previous dancefloor-based output can feel cold and uninvolving.

But the lack of empathy in the lyrics means she continues to come across as a blank canvas in an era when her competition (Taylor Swift) is detailing the London locations she used to visit with a former beau she’s currently dissing, a bitterness we can perhaps all understand if not entirely appreciate.

We’re enjoying the Prince-like 70s funk interludes of Anything For Love, the Shakira-esque heartfelt wail of Falling Forever and emotional lyrics of These Walls that hint there might be a broken heart buried deep amid the slightly frustrating phrasing: ‘It’s not supposed to hurt this much, Oh, if These Walls could talk, they’d tell us to break up.’

But Lipa did need to do something different and show some depth and range and we wish her well with her Glastonbury headline slot because this is exactly the sort of album she needs under her belt to make the success of it we have no doubt that she will.

So it’s a mild diverting foray into a slightly different sound that we don’t expect she will repeat containing some fine singles illustrated here which continue her run of hits without ever hitting the Barbie jugular as Dance The Night did.

• Main picture via Facebook courtesy Dua Lipa Tickets
• Have you seen a Dua Lipa show before and what did you think of this album? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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