She writes utterly directly, with a self-awareness that’s darkly funny and deeply sad (“I hate living by the hospital/ The sirens go all night/ I used to joke that if they woke you up/ Somebody better be dying” or “I swear I’m not angry, that’s just my face”). Punisher was the album where Phoebe Bridgers, long a master of collaboration, really justified the hype around her solo music. Who knew that Lipa’s evocation of nostalgia would also eventually apply to our old way of life? Dua Lipa, a modern pop visionary. As if that wasn’t enough, she then live-streamed a performance of the best tracks on both albums from London’s currently-closed, mega-club, Printworks. Teaming up with The Blessed Madonna for an album of remixes by the industry’s best (think features from Missy Elliot and Madonna, and remixes from Horse Meat Disco and Dimitri From Paris), Club Future Nostalgia both made us giddy with the sound of a 2am DJ set and furious that we couldn’t hear it on a real dancefloor.
“Don’t Start Now”, “Break My Heart”, “Hallucinate” and “Levitating” are all songs that were tailor-made for sweating it out on the dancefloor, an accomplishment Lipa double downed on with the release of Club Future Nostalgia. It’s smart pop music, revealing Lipa to be a star who knows her references, as she winks at the past and keeps her tongue in her cheek on lust-fuelled tracks such as “Pretty Please” and “Good In Bed”.
THE ENGLISH BEAT ALBUMS RANKED FULL
Each track makes the case to be listened to in full within its first 30 seconds, be it the heady synths on “Cool” or the arresting sample of Lew Stone & the Monseigneur Band’s “My Woman” on “Love Again”. Well, Dua Lipa can consider her mission accomplished.īut Lipa’s greatest achievement with Future Nostalgia is that she managed to create one of the most elusive things in music: an album with absolutely no skippable songs. “You want a timeless song, I wanna change the game,” she asserts on its opening line. This was an album to unite the new and the old, the edgy contemporary and kitsch nostalgia, and, reader, there would be no flops.
Lipa woke it up abruptly with bolts of Prince-eque synths and 2000s production quirks, making her mission statement clear on the album’s opening, title track, “Future Nostalgia”. Dua Lipa’s second studio album Future Nostalgia dropped just as the first lockdown in the UK began, setting the tone for 2020’s disco resurgence, which at the time, was just a faint, funky bassline echoing through our home offices.
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