Dua Lipa: ‘You can’t allow other people’s words to affect your growth’

Dua Lipa’s breakout 2017 hit ‘New Rules’ was a manifesto for women and relationships. Now, with her second album, Future Nostalgia, the edicts are still for women, only this time she and her cowriters took on the recording industry... and won

ByDavid Levesley

6 May 2020

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Dua Lipa figured out how she was going to save pop music while walking, alone, around Las Vegas. At the corner of faux-New York and faux-Paris, inspired byOutkast and Gwen Stefani, she conceived the name for her second album:Future Nostalgia.

“I messaged my A&R, ‘I think I have myalbum title,’” she recalls. “He’s like, ‘Once you tell me this, and if your heart is set on it, we can’t tell anyone. It’s like a baby name.” As soon as she said “Future Nostalgia” – a reference to pushing her sound forward, while also a tribute to the 2000s electropop and R&B she grew up on – it was a lock. It focused the songs, it focused Lipa and it gave the album a purpose. “I want it to be the album that young girls look back on the way I look back onMissundaztood by Pink orThe Dutchess by Fergie,” she says. “I want it to be a soundtrack for young girls when they get older. I want it to age well.”

The focus has clearly worked. It’s been a hot while since an album’s launch has come out so consistently strong from the offing. When the first song, “Don’t Start Now”, dropped in November 2019, it at once became the perfect soundtrack to every TV advert,SoulCycle class andwedding dance floor. Then, the title track: a weird, sexy banger that feels more like The Pointer Sisters’ “Automatic” than anything in the Top 40. Then, a few weeks before we met, she released “Physical”, a storming bop that did absolutely everything the old Lipa didn’t: it was about love rather than heartbreak, with a video full of intense choreography and bringing the kind ofMoroder-esque darkness that made it feel like a forgotten gem fromFlashdance.

Her fourth, “Break My Heart” – “my special one”, she calls it – features an INXS sample. “That’s ‘dance-crying’ to a tee,” she says with a laugh, using her term for what others might call asad banger. “It came from a really good place: that thing of being so happy.” After becoming known as the woman who sticks a finger up at all your awful exes, Lipa has gone full optimist. “I’ve been describing the album as a dancercise class. It keeps you moving.” There’s barely a ballad in sight. “Some mid-tempo bits that give me a bit of a breather when I’m on tour... but I’ve been a little bit relentless with this one.”

It was her sixth single, 2017’s “New Rules”, that changed the game for her. After entering the UK singles chart at No75, it climbed to No1 over the next five weeks, thanks to the video’s viral success, becoming the first UK chart topper for a female solo artist sinceAdele’s “Hello” in 2015.

“I also didn’t think my album was going to do what it did,” admits Lipa. The song’s cowriter, Emily Warren, credits its success, in part, to being a break-up song for women by women. “Women are singing what men think they want to say,” says Warren, “rather than what they want to.” The success of “New Rules” – a song ofLysistrata-level female solidarity, released in the middle of theMe Too movement – has changed all that. “People care about what you’re saying,” Warren continued, “because they need what you’re saying, because that’s the music people want to hear.”

‘I was born to do this. I’m exactly where I’m meant to be’

That’s what Lipa’s first album became known for: songs about the catharsis of getting over bad former lovers, the fundamental fabric of disco music, even if she was drawing more from R&B than Donna Summer. But the sound ofFuture Nostalgia – which mixes Janet Jackson, Moloko and more – “is a better representation of me than my first record”, says Lipa, as I hitch a ride with her through London between appointments in March, an indication of just how busy she is currently.

“I thought my first record was so me...” Yet, withFuture Nostalgia, she says, the name gave the whole thing a more singular vision. “This time I feel like I’m really finding my feet.”

Born in northwest London to Kosovan parents, she moved to Pristina, the Kosovan capital, for her father’s work when she was eleven. Three years later she asked to move back to London: she wanted to attend weekend classes at Sylvia Young Theatre School. She sold it to them by saying she needed A-levels to get into a British university. Back in the UK she started a blog, tried acting and modelling, networking around the city and sending people her demos. She signed a contract in 2013 with Lana Del Rey’s managers, Ben Mawson and Ed Millett, and then a record deal in 2015. “She signed to Warner Bros partly because they didn’t have a big female pop artist and they needed one,” Millett said in 2018. “They really wanted her, so she had the focus of the team from day one.” It’s a story of savvy ambition. “If you assert yourself and you know exactly what you want, people are going to call you a bitch,” Lipa tells me with a shrug. “But you can’t allow other people’s words to affect your growth.”

While “New Rules” went viral for all the right reasons, some of her live performances found a less pleasant afterlife online. One 2018 performance of her Calvin Harris collaboration “One Kiss”, in particular, became a meme due to its awkward choreography: the performance ended up as shorthand for any moment when one is asked to dance or move reluctantly and was even parodied bydrag queens – a sure sign that you’ve entered the cultural lexicon.

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Lipa knows what the internet thought of that performance. She even retweeted thejokes. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hurtful, though. “Once you get big enough, everybody wants to see if you can back it up. And rightfully so,” she says, never firmer than when discussing the bargain of success. “But at the same time, I was learning; I was at the beginning of my career. And so I did feel like it was quite unfair when I started getting hate about certain things – what I was doing, what my performances were like, what my dancing was like, what my singing was like – and I felt like I was being picked at from so many angles of my life.”

As Lipa would like to point out, women in pop have long been expected to be athletes as much as singers, a bar men are rarely expected to match. “I remember going to a show by...” Lipa pauses and stops herself from naming names, a wry but polite smile crossing her face, “...a male artist that actually doesn’t do anything on stage. And they got this stellar five-star review. But then you have women who get up on stage and they’re practically doing cartwheels, costume changes – it’s a spectacle. And then [reviewers] nitpick every little thing.” But while Lipa is more than aware of the double standards put on women and musicians from marginalised communities, she’s also not somebody to wallow in self-pity.

“It almost seemed like a myth to be able to do everything on stage,” says Lipa, laughing. “I was like, ‘At least if I can just sing my song really well then nothing else matters.’ But I think now I’ve come to terms with the fact it just has to be all or nothing. It’s made me so much stronger.” Lipa realised she couldn’t release a disco record and not serve visuals and performance alongside, so she practised. A lot. “I sat in a dance studio with Charm La’Donna, my choreographer in LA, for two weeks, just doing the routine over and over again until I literally knew it in my sleep.”

Lady Gaga’sMonster Ball andBeyoncé’sFormation tours). “The EMAs,” she says, “was the first time I felt I can do this.”

The performance didn’t just establish her artistic vision: from direction and choreography to vocal coaching and make-up, the entire thing was led by women, something Lipa is fiercely passionate about. Never shy to call out inequality – during her acceptance speech for Best New Artist at the 2019Grammys she called out the then Recording Academy president Neil Portnow for previously suggesting women needed to “step up” if they wanted to be recognised by the awards – Lipa is now committed to getting more women into roles in music from which they have traditionally been absent.

“There is a massive problem – that maybe starts in schools – in which girls aren’t necessarily encouraged to play more masculine instruments, aren’t really encouraged to go into production, whereas men naturally fall into that path.” Production and engineering are hugely dominated by men: in a 2016 survey by the Audio Engineering Society, only seven per cent of their members identified as women. Other groups, such as the Women’s Audio Mission, suggest this number is lower.

When I ask Lipa how many women are in the credits forFuture Nostalgia, there is a definite pause. “There are no female producers on the record, which, you know... Hopefully in the future I would be able to work with more of them. I just, in all honesty, don’t know very many. And I really wish I did, because I would really take the time to sit down and hone in a sound with women.”

Lipa loves the men she works with – “I wouldn’t have gotten these songs without them” – but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t cherish the energy of having other women in the room. “I’ll never forget when I first started going to the studio. I was only 17. I went into rooms that were predominantly male, or a lot older than me, and when I was initially writing I wouldn’t open up as much as I wanted to or wouldn’t express what I wanted to write about because I felt these people had been doing it for longer than me.”

‘If there was more female energy in studios it wouldn’t feel so intimidating’

But the women who worked on her first album really helped her to find her voice: people such as Emily Warren and Caroline Ailin, who cowrote “New Rules”, or Sarah Hudson, who cowrote “Genesis”. “They really helped me come into myself and be able to write things that come from the heart,” says Lipa. “My very, very closest friends are all girls. I always feel it’s easier to talk to girls and I’m more open around female energy. Maybe if women in general had a little bit more of that in studios it wouldn’t feel so intimidating to begin with.”

Miley Cyrus – but, she says, “They thought the lyrics were too young.” Then, a year-and-a-half later, Lipa’s people came back to her. They were going to do it as a collaboration withK-pop sensationBlackpink – it now has more than 300 million streams on Spotify. “For [Lipa] it was an important record, because it was just me and her and then we brought on the Blackpink girls,” says Grimes. “Dua’s all for the girls.”

Underestimated but ultimately successful female-written pop songs have a habit of following Lipa around. “New Rules”, the song that changed her self-titled album from a good debut into a worldwide smash, had been recorded long before it became Lipa’s first UK No1. Cowriter Warren feels that the song ripped up the rule book of what was expected for women in pop. “When I first got signed and came out to LA, I was working with a seasoned male writer and he told me that whenever you write a lyric you should make sure the guy doesn’t think he isn’t going to ‘get it’,” she says, sighing. “‘New Rules’ was such a cool moment for all of us: it’s the opposite.”

‘If I followed stan culture, I’d probably try to remake “New Rules” over and over’

Grimes says that often it’s not just men that can make life difficult for women in the industry. “I’ve heard management or agents say, ‘Oh, she doesn’t like working with girls,’” she tells me. “I know top-liners who write the biggest songs of the year and won’t wear make-up because artists will feel threatened. Sometimes it’s the girls who make us dilute ourselves.” Lipa, says Grimes, creates a very different energy. “She’s about closeness and togetherness of everything. I respect Dua a lot.”

Lauren D’Elia, one of the album’s only two female producers, was brought in to help deliver a very specific sound to the album track “Hallucinate”. She was picked, she thinks, because of her work with Kaytranada and producing his female collaborators’ vocal performances. D’Elia says that when female artists enter the room, she is usually the first female vocal producer they’ve worked with. “I don’t want to speak for Dua, but I’ve heard from other artists that there is this comfort that comes from seeing a female in my position,” she explained. “Recording vocals is a very intimate thing. An artist shows you their imperfect side – it’s everything before it’s a perfect song. Being a woman, a younger woman, there’s this wall that comes down immediately.”

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“I think it’s probably a little bit of both,” says “Pretty Please” cowriter Julia Michaels. “The artist is in the public eye. They’re a role model to a lot of people and they want to set an example. It’s up to the label to agree to do those things.” Ali Tamposi – who cowrote “Break My Heart” – argues that it needs to fall on labels and management: “The artists have their focus, performance, so I don’t think the awareness is fully there of which female songwriters are on the rise.”

Twitter and outside of stan culture (the fickle loving and loathing of women in pop music). “I needed to create an album that I was really proud of, without the opinion of other people,” she says. “If I stayed online and tried to follow the guidelines of stan culture, I’d probably be trying to remake ‘New Rules’ over and over again.”

The response to her new sound has been huge. The doubters have realised Lipa is the pop star she knows she can be. “Even after I got Best New Artist at the Grammys, I think everybody maybe expected me to fall. But, like I said, I think I’m meant to be here.”

Lipa has always been sold as a deeply ambitious pop star, one who isn’t afraid to let you know how much she wants this. But what “this” is has clearly evolved, matured and been refined. “I feel like I’ve grown so much as a person.Future Nostalgia has opened a door for me mentally that’s helped me understand what I want.” You just have to watch her perform to see this isn’t only hot air. We’re seeing the second stage of a truly great pop talent.

That is part of the charm ofFuture Nostalgia-era Lipa. Nobody can doubt now she deserves her success, because her drive helped to make something so fun, so sexy and so undeniably her. “Sometimes people would be like, ‘Oh, you know, maybe you’re not ready for it.’ And I was like, ‘I know that I was born to do this. And I know that I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.’” At these words, there’s adamantium resolve in Lipa’s doe eyes, the look of a woman who has found her sound and has no plans to let it go. “This was all just part of my learning phase.”

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