HEADLINE How Dua Lipa Revived Dance-Pop And Made Disco The Sound Of The 2020s
TAGS: Dua Lipa, Daft Punk, Chic, Donna Summer, Madonna, Blondie, Bee Gees, DaBaby, Ian Kirkpatrick, Stuart Price, Jeff Bhasker, Carly Rae Jepsen,
BLOG POST When Dua Lipa released ‘Future Nostalgia’ on March 27, 2020, the pop landscape was tilted toward downbeat, moody, streaming-friendly introspection. Two years later, the charts were full of strings, funk bass, and four-on-the-floor euphoria. The line between those two moments runs straight through her second album.
The record arrived at a strange moment, dropping a week ahead of schedule right as the pandemic shut the world down. Lipa worried about releasing a party album while people were suffering, telling Variety it was “a very happy album” and that she didn’t want to put it out at the wrong time. The timing turned out to work in her favor. With dance floors closed, the album became a disco remedy for isolation, the soundtrack to bedroom dance breaks before it ever reached a club.
Musically, Lipa committed hard to the bit. ‘Future Nostalgia’ leaned into disco strings and funk bass in the vein of Chic and Donna Summer, with house-inflected tracks like “Hallucinate” and the Olivia Newton-John-referencing “Physical.” Lead single “Don’t Start Now” set the template, a nu-disco breakup anthem built on a funk bassline inspired by the Bee Gees and Daft Punk. It was a clear homage to disco’s history and the synth-pop that followed, and the aesthetic ran through every choice she made.
The numbers backed up the ambition. “Levitating” became one of the longest-charting songs in Billboard Hot 100 history, named the publication’s No. 1 Hot 100 song of all of 2021 despite peaking at No. 2 on the weekly chart, and it stayed in the Top 10 for 41 weeks, a record for a song by a female artist. The album itself won Best Pop Vocal Album at the 63rd Grammys and British Album of the Year at the 2021 BRITs, with Lipa earning six Grammy nominations that year, including Album of the Year.
Lipa did more than score hits. She shifted the weather. Critics credit ‘Future Nostalgia’ with sparking a disco-pop comeback in the early 2020s, influencing the genre’s direction for years after. The throwback wave that followed, from Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ to the broader nu-disco surge, had a clear frontrunner. Where artists like Carly Rae Jepsen had kept these sounds alive in the margins, Lipa pushed them to the absolute center of the mainstream.
The proof of the revival is that she kept building on it. By the time “Houdini” launched her third album era, working with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and producer Danny L Harle, dance-pop had become the dominant pop currency, and Lipa had spent years refining it. She didn’t invent disco, and she’d be the first to say so, but she made it the sound of her decade, and the genre’s full-scale return to the charts is hard to imagine without her.