When you’ve obtained via the darker, extra industrial sound of “Houdini” and “Coaching Season,” the document opens up right into a kaleidoscopic, summer-ready collection of pop delights. There’s the bittersweet “These Partitions,” with its call-and-response refrain charting the dissolution of a poisonous relationship, or the lolloping funk bassline and ABBA-esque melodies of “Whatcha Doing,” which sees her query the head-spinning results of a brand new lover’s seductions. (If management is my faith / And I’m headin’ for collision / Misplaced my 20/20 imaginative and prescient,” she croons.)
Whereas a lot of the songs appear to chart an previous love ending and a brand new one starting, it says rather a lot about Lipa’s capability to stability the extraordinary public curiosity in her private life—it solely takes a fast Google to find who she’s dated over the previous few years—with a type of fastidiously engineered unknowability. The prevailing (and evidently extremely profitable) method to scoring a chart-topping single for the previous few years has been to stability the confessional and the cryptic: to sprinkle sufficient clues and Easter eggs to maintain the gossip blogs whirring and their rabid fanbases combing via each lyric, and thus to make sure their place within the public dialog. As an alternative, on Radical Optimism, Lipa appears to take her cues from a distinct era of divas—Minogue being certainly one of them—who’ve, for probably the most half, drawn a line within the sand between their songwriting and their private lives. (Nice pop, you can argue, is common, not “relatable.”)
That’s to not say the album doesn’t have character, nonetheless. Greater than ever earlier than, Lipa leans into her humorousness, notably on the deliciously tongue-in-cheek Europudding bangers “French Exit” and “Maria.” The previous’s shuffle beat and bouncy guitar line function a pleasant backdrop to one of many document’s extra bonkers moments, as she intones the title in a knowingly foolish French accent, whereas the latter options Spanish guitar and the delicate clack of castanets, as she sings her gratitude to the fiery former ex of her present associate for educating him to be the lover he’s at this time. (You might additionally argue that the album cowl and title together carry a contact of wry humor: it will definitely require a very radical sense of optimism to be leaning again and staring down a shark in open water within the informal means Lipa seems to be.)
