It can be hard to create a pop album that leans so heavily on the past. It can be irritatingly self-referential, it can be smug in its execution and cocky in its songwriting. Sometimes there’s nothing worse than an artist beating you around the head with their influences and adoration for a past era. With Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa skilfully dodges all the usual pitfalls of tackling retro-fetishism to create an album that manages to look back to the past for inspiration while being firmly rooted in the present.
Abandoning the slightly sickly pop sheen of her previous work, Future Nostalgia pushes the singer’s boundaries further than ever, hijacking elements of funk, disco and house to create a mature and sophisticated pop album that effortlessly blends the charismatic vocals with instrumentals that bounce and weave with an aesthetic that can only really be called ‘future nostalgia’.
So what is this ‘future nostalgia’? It’s retro-futurism - presenting a vision of the future dreamt up in the past, a bizarre otherworldly quality to a time that, ostensibly, is the present. This gives the album a tonal quality quite unlike anything Dua Lipa has ever released before, allowing her to experiment with sounds and styles from the past to create an aesthetic that sounds tailor-made to the modern age. Parts of the album sound like Madonna or Kylie, others sound like Giorgio Moroder or Daft Punk - it’s a collision of genres and eras that gives Future Nostalgia a sense of timelessness in the purest sense of the word - it is hard to pinpoint an exact era of influence.
This makes its way into the Daft Punk-esque robo-funk of vocoder lines on the title track, the snappy and thick funk bass lines that cut and weave through lead single ‘Don’t Start Now’ and swooning, auto tuned vocals and club beat of ‘Hallucinate’. There’s echoes of Olivia Newton John in a flip of her track ‘Physical’ and a certain glimmer of Nile Rogers in the guitar lines dotted across the project. These are the moments where the album truly shines, where Dua Lipa galvanises retro aesthetics whilst injecting her own swagger and bravado.
Other tracks like ‘Levitating’ and ‘Cool’ are more conventional pop belters, firmly within the singer’s wheelhouse but utterly transformed by the glistening production and dense instrumentals. These tracks might not bring as much punch in their songwriting but they more than make up for it in their charisma. There’s also a distinct British flavour to the vocals Dua Lipa brings to the table, with the semi-spoken passages on ‘Future Nostalgia’, a welcome reminder that America’s grip on the pop-world is loosening.
If you hadn’t realised by now, this album is pretty much all about sex. From the sultry bounce of ‘Pretty Please’ where Dua Lipa is begging for stress-relief sex to the Lily Allen-esque lilt of the verses on ‘Good In Bed’. Future Nostalgia is unapologetic in its sexuality and you can’t help but love the confidence of it all.
Even tracks like ‘Love Again’ aren’t really about Dua Lipa loving a man; they’re about her loving sex.
This means it may not be exactly nuanced in its emotion or subtle in its songwriting but I can’t help but admire it for that. It gives the album a swagger that makes Future Nostalgia so charismatic and so endearing. From the collision of genres and styles that she brings to the table to the bare sexuality of her songwriting to the bounce and bravado of the instrumentals - this is an album that oozes style and confidence.
It’s funky, it’s proud - it’s sexy.
8.5/10
Alex Thompson
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