Future Nostalgia

In my 18 years of life, I've been around to see mainstream pop music change three different times that I can recall. In 2009, Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster, a nearly 90-minute reissue/deluxe edition of her 2008 debut The Fame, revived the sound of electropop in mainstream music after Y2K-era pop artists faded into the background as nothing more than a memory for most. In 2013, the elusive Lorde released Pure Heroine and the even more elusive Sky Ferreira released Night Time, My Time. Both albums sounded different, but the result was the same. The sound of Lady Gaga's album never really fell out of style, but the Lorde and Sky Ferreira debuts signaled that you can succeed (to varying degrees) by putting a darker spin on the sound of pop that was more downtrodden in lyrical content. In 2014, Taylor Swift released 1989, an album that completed Swift's evolution from country superstar to worldwide phenomenon. All three moments felt significant. In 2020, Dua Lipa released her sophomore album, Future Nostalgia. It's an album that perfectly encapsulates its title, and it feels like she's going to be directly responsible for the next genre-wide reset that happens once every few years. It's a borderline perfect pop album with long-term implications that make the future of pop look extremely promising.

Dua Lipa was not an artist I was immediately sold on. In 2017, she came out with her self-titled debut album. It was... fine. It wasn't offensively bad by any stretch, but there was nothing that suggested pop superstardom was in her future. If there was, it definitely wasn't less than three years away. But then, she put out "Don't Start Now" as the lead single for this album in late 2019. As a reintroduction to Dua Lipa, "Don't Start Now" was the only song from the album that could've worked. It showed a new direction for her as an artist, a more danceable song by an artist with a newfound confidence in her ability. "Physical" was the next single, and it was with this song where I realized that she had "it." I don't know what happened in those two and a half years between her debut album and the rollout of her sophomore album, but what I recognized was that we were one great album away from Dua Lipa becoming a flat-out superstar.

And then, she put out "Levitating."

In a year where The Weeknd dominated the very top of the charts and a number of songs that got popular on TikTok rotated through as well, "Levitating" was perhaps the single most consistent presence in popular music across all of 2020 (realistically, it's second to "Blinding Lights"). For my money, it's the best pop song of 2020, and I would go so far as to say that it's the best pop song of the last half-decade. The production is immaculate (as is the production on the majority of the album), the songwriting is top-level stuff, and the "you can fly away with me tonight" post-chorus has been stuck in my head for close to a year at this point. "Levitating" was the one, more than either of the other two singles, where it became understood that Lipa was here to stay.

The next and second-to-last song I want to really go in depth with is "Love Again." The fact that this song wasn't a single until almost a full year after the album's release blows my mind. It may very well be the best song on the album. A sample of Lew Stone's "My Woman," most popularly used on "Your Woman" by White Town, is the base of this track, and from there, it progresses into a brilliant electropop banger that best evokes the sound of the 1980s. The songwriting is fantastic, and the hook is sure to stick in your head (as it has with me).

"Boys Will Be Boys" is the closer, and I saw a lot of people dislike it when it first came out. I don't really agree. I think that lyrically, the song is necessary. Vocally, it's great as well. My issue with the track is that the production feels a little melodramatic at times (although I'm a fan of the string sections during the hook), and it doesn't really fit the theme of the album from a purely musical perspective. It's a good closer but I can't help but feel that it would've benefitted more from being a standalone song.

Future Nostalgia feels like a turning point in pop music and was, in my opinion, the best pop release of 2020. It's like a reimagining of the 1980s electropop sound combined with the sound that The Fame Monster worked so hard to cultivate and popularize. It's a borderline flawless pop album, with the hook on "Good In Bed" and parts of the production on the closer being my only real issues. Other than that, my initial assessment of Dua Lipa, the artist, was clearly very wrong. It's going to be hard for her to outdo this one, but if she's capable of what will certainly be regarded as one of the best, if not the best, pop album of the 2020s, I can't really say it's not possible.