Dua Lipa Devotes Herself to Pleasure with “Radical Optimism”

During the past seven years, Lipa has grown as a dancer and a performer—in the video for her first big single, “New Rules,” from 2017, she moved in such a relaxed way that it was occasionally giving “Weekend at Bernie’s”—and, though she is more magnetic and practiced now, she still exudes a kind of detached coolness, as if she could take it or leave it. Lipa has legions of dedicated followers (particularly on Instagram, where she is often pictured looking hot and holding a book), but I have wondered, at times, if this is why she has not cultivated a frothing, hysterical fan community: there’s just something gloriously untouchable about her. Her apparent needlessness can seem aspirational to anyone in the throes of too much feeling. “I don’t wanna stay till the lights come on / I just can’t relate to the words of this love song,” she sings on “French Exit,” a new song. On “Anything for Love,” a piano ballad that transforms into a twitchy synth-pop tune, she sings about how prone she is to just getting over it already: “And I’m not interested in a love that gives up so easily / I want a love that’s set on keeping me.”