Dua Lipa was in the final stages of completing her third album—or so she believed. “I had a whole bunch of songs and I really thought I was very close to finishing,” she says. “Then I got in the studio with Danny Harle and Kevin Parker, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is completely different from everything that I thought I was doing—this is where I've been trying to get to.’ We ended up writing so many songs together that the old songs started falling away and I knew this was where I was supposed to be. This was the sound of the new record.” The result is Radical Optimism, the wildly anticipated follow-up to 2020’s Future Nostalgia, a global sensation which became the sixth-most-streamed album in Spotify’s history, went to Number One in fourteen countries, and established Lipa as one of the world’s biggest pop stars. Boldly, however, she chose to point this album in a different direction, with a new attitude, new sounds, and a remarkable new team.