Who better than Dua Lipa to dignify pop, which is so lacking in new ideas while hits from the past continue to plague the charts? Regarding her long-awaited fourth album, we only know that Dua Lipa is recording it because she has uploaded photos from the studio and others have photographed her leaving it, specifically from Electric Lady Studios.
What clues do these photos give? Few, but we know that at least she has been recording with a renowned producer, Greg Kurstin, tagged in one of her publications, and also with Ali Tamposi, known for having co-written ‘Break My Heart’ for Dua Lipa herself, in addition to songs for artists such as Miley Cyrus, Camila Cabello, 5 Seconds of Summer or Shawn Mendes. He has also worked with the Canadian poet and singer Mustafa, with whom he has been seen having dinner. And he has recently been seen with Troye Sivan, but they have been friends for a long time.
It is impossible to guess what Dua Lipa’s next album will sound like, but we can conclude that it will be released in 2027. The Hits Daily Double portal, with connections in the industry, has recently published that the album is expected exactly in “early 2027” and, in addition, has named Dua Lipa among the people who sound the strongest to headline next year’s Coachella edition. Dua Lipa will not be the headliner of a festival without a new album on the market, or so we want to believe.
Curiously, another of the names that is in the pools is his friend and collaborator Tame Impala, who is killing it with ‘Dracula’ and ‘Loser’, but be careful, also indirectly with ‘Training Season’, one of Dua Lipa’s singles produced by him, which has gone viral in recent months on TikTok.
‘Training Season’ was originally about stopping wasting time on men who needed to be taught how to behave like the partner you wanted, but now the internet has turned it into a romantic manifestation song. The trigger for all this is that Dua Lipa’s performance of ‘Training Season’ at the Royal Albert Hall in 2024 has been reinterpreted by fans as a kind of premonition of her relationship with Callum Turner.
The phenomenon has been enough to return ‘Training Season’ to the charts more than two years after its release. It is currently in Spotify’s global top 20 and is even aiming for a new high, number 2 on the Billboard Global 200, after its original peak was number 6. It is the umpteenth case of how TikTok can resurrect a song that had already completed its commercial cycle.
That shouldn’t give us, in any case, too obvious a clue about the sound of the next album. That would be too predictable. Dua Lipa is not known for inventing the wheel musically, but she is known for offering sophisticated productions, especially in her more disco-funky side, and it is to be hoped that her fourth album will continue to offer quality pop. Ideally an evolution.
What there is room for improvement is with respect to ‘Radical Optimism’, an album that in the end was not the failure that many predicted, but which was an artistic step aside for Dua Lipa. Between more risky productions like ‘Houdini’ or ‘Training Season’ itself, what the album offered was a fairly soft collection of commercial pop for all audiences, which had little radical.
Dua Lipa’s fourth album should give us a stronger view of who she is as a person and artist. And here ‘Training Season’ comes in again: a song that in 2024 talked about looking for someone who was up to the task and that in 2026, after her marriage to Callum Turner, seems almost written after the fact. In fact, Dua Lipa herself has recently explained that she is now interested in writing about love from a place other than heartbreak: not so much about being broken or about search and desire, but about the complexities of a relationship and its silent aspects.
Given that she has just married Callum Turner, it would not be unreasonable to expect an album dedicated to marital bliss, marked by the sophisticated and beautiful sound of the Italian vacations that she loves so much. Could that editorial with Vogue Italia be a clue? Dua just took to TikTok to say that the “holiday season isn’t over yet,” and we’d love nothing more than for her next album to evoke a wonderful vacation. A honeymoon, at least.
