For Dua Lipa, Just Being a Pop Star Isn’t Enough

LET’S GET THIS out of the way: Dua Lipa is finishing her third album. It’s due for release in 2024 and, despite the trend of musicians announcing and delaying records for years, Lipa will almost certainly meet her deadline. It’s funny to think of a pop star — or any successful young artist — as just another striving professional. But at 27, Lipa has already become the kind of multihyphenate entrepreneur who not only finishes her assignments on time but discusses strategy and efficiency with the clarity of a company founder delivering a TED Talk. “If I wasn’t as organized as I am, I would be a mess right now,” she says when we meet one drizzly May afternoon in London. The singer had asked one of her favorite restaurants, Sushi on Jones, hidden on the second floor of a King’s Cross concert venue, to open before dinner so we could have the place to ourselves, then arrived 10 minutes early to make sure everything was as planned.

A lot happened in March 2020, so you probably won’t recall that Lipa’s second album, “Future Nostalgia,” leaked at the beginning of the lockdowns, denying her the precise rollout she’d spent many months finessing, postponing her international tour . . . and unintentionally cementing her as the leading pop star of the pandemic. Her barrage of shimmery singles — music for “dance crying,” as she describes it — later established her as the only female artist with two albums that have surpassed 10 billion streams on Spotify.

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. Lipa’s dressed — almost studiously — in pop star-off-duty drag: Ugg slip-ons, baggy white jeans, an old Elton John T-shirt, a few diamond-encrusted hoops in each ear.

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