Dua Lipa Confirms Third Album Out in 2024, Addresses Years-Long Boycott of 'New York Times' Coverage & Why She Has Her Own Media Platform
Dua Lipa is addressing her relationship with the media.
The 27-year-old “Don’t Start Now” superstar spoke out in an interview with the New York Times, out now.
During the conversation, she spoke about her third studio album, due out next year, why she’s wary about the media, having her own platform with Service95, and what she thinks about getting personal with her music.
Keep reading to find out more…
Find out what she had to say…
On her third album, out in 2024:
“The next record will still be pop, she says, lest her ‘fans have a meltdown.’ She doesn’t want to ‘alienate’ them, although she’s developing a new sound that may be informed less by the house and disco beats beneath songs like ‘Physical’ and ‘Hallucinate’ than by 1970s-era psychedelia. She’s working with a smaller group of songwriting collaborators, supposedly including Kevin Parker of the Australian psych-rock band Tame Impala, a rumor she all but confirms by denying: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says, then looks away and laughs a little.”
On the media, and being wary of journalists:
“Especially being in the public eye, someone’s always waiting for you to trip or fail or whatever.”
On preparing for her next release:
“You have no idea what the reaction is going to be once it’s out, so there’s this nervous feeling.”
On her many commitments:
“I don’t even want to show you my phone, because I’m embarrassed about it, but it’s really down to the minute: where I’m going, what I’m doing…wake up, glam, prep for podcast…I have to watch Succession, so I’ve got to schedule that…for as long as I’m having fun, I’m going to keep making music. But why can’t I do other things that I love, too?”
On using her voice, and her Service95 platform:
“My intention is never to be political … but there’s a political bent to my existence. The easiest thing you can do is just hide away and not have an opinion about anything…I’ve found being in the media this way very encouraging.”
On why she’s so interested in journalism:
“She likes ‘being thrown into the deep end’ and acquiring new skills, above all those that are ‘aligned’ with her ‘activism and love of reading.’ She’s been interested in media since high school, especially after her father got a master’s degree in journalism when he returned to Kosovo. (He became her manager last year after she parted ways with [Ben] Mawson.) She wants to honor the sacrifices her parents made; these various gigs satisfy ‘what’s maybe the immigrant mentality … this thing I have in my head where I know that, if I don’t work hard enough, the rug could just be pulled from under my feet.’”
On using her own outlet to send direct messages, like when she denounced collaborator DaBaby’s homophobic comments at a festival in 2021:
“That sort of direct communication ‘was something artists didn’t have before,’ she says. ‘Whatever was said about you in the press, that was it: That’s who you are.’”
On her two year-long boycott of The New York Times:
“In 2021, an organization founded by the American Orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach ran a full-page ad in The New York Times accusing Lipa of antisemitism after she defended Palestinian human rights. Her representatives asked the paper’s leaders to apologize, but they didn’t. For more than two years, Lipa has turned down all coverage opportunities in The Times. Then she convinced Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s former executive editor, to come on her podcast last December. When she brought up the controversy, he had little to say about the company’s decisions (he still works here), explaining the church-and-state divisions between editorial and advertising departments. To her, the exchange went as anticipated: ‘It was enough for me to voice it to the guy at the top,’ and she could then move on from something that had bothered her for years.”
On not putting personal life Easter eggs in her music:
“I think it’s a marketing tool: How confessional can you be? I also don’t put so much of my life out there for people to dig into the music in this weird, analytical way.”
On how the next album will still be “more personal”:
“Two days before we’d met for sushi, Lipa had been rewatching How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, the 2020 documentary about the Bee Gees, ‘just bawling my eyes out,’ she says, with her boyfriend, Romain Gavras, a 42-year-old French Greek film director. (Tellingly, her relationship with Gavras is the only thing her publicist asked that I not bring up myself.) In the film, someone talks about ‘music that just makes your body feel good,’ she explains. ‘Those are the songs I get attached to — that’s the kind of feeling I want to convey.’”
Fans also wondered if her Barbie song has a hint about her third album!