"I'm at a place in my career where I feel really confident, it took me so long to get to this place," Dua Lipa told Zane Lowe in one of her many promotional interviews leading up to her third studio album, Radical Optimism. This confidence and growth Lipa talks about is palpable throughout the 11 romantic boppy tales with an optimistic flare that she includes on her latest record.

It took the pop icon a while to be fully confessional in her lyric writing. Yet, it becomes obvious as you move from one track to another, that she is not trying to repeat the success of something that has already happened. She is not replicating any of her sounds or previous records, taking a big step away from 80’s disco. If her last album, Future Nostalgia, was about escaping our lives during lockdown, then Radical Optimism is about facing, head on, our current realities that have brought us to the moment where we are today.

“Illusion”, the first song Dua Lipa wrote for this record, on the 11th of July 2022 with Caroline Ailin and Tobias Jesso Jr and its producers Danny L. Harle and Kevin Parker, kicked them off and gave them confidence as a group to continue crafting tracks for the record. The next day, she wrote "Happy for You", the album closer and the rest is history. Even though this album sounds exactly like a Dua Lipa record, it is vastly different thematically from its predecessors. Radical Optismism is all about the idea of “rolling with the punches, (…) always seeing the positive side of things, always being able to grow and move forward and change your perspective regardless of what is happening in your life, whether its heartbreak, friendship or whether it’s just growing and seeing things differently,” Dua Lipa confesses in  her latest Apple Music Interview.

This growth she talks about extensively on her promotional campaign, shines particularly in her vocals especially on tracks like “Falling Forever”. On this track that Lipa describes as her manifestation song, she lets it all out in a way we had never heard the popstar showcase her lower raspy tenor.

From the sassy kiss-off post-breakup track "IDGAF," released on her debut studio album in 2017, where Dua Lipa openly expresses not “giving a fuck” about an ex-lover, to the heartfelt closing track "Happy For You," the evolution is striking. "Happy For You," is perhaps the most personally revealing of Lipa's real-life optimism, where the singer-songwriter expresses a vulnerable sentiment while witnessing someone she once shared a connection with moving on. The closing track of the album embodies the emotional complexity of growth and acceptance, reflecting a pop star deeply aware of her artistic evolution as much as her personal journey.

In fact, Dua Lipa wrote this entire album in diary form, in a notebook that she had newly bought with the mere desire to journal and reflect more on her day to day. It all started when she initially jotted the words Radical Optismism on its first page.

However, a lot of mysteries pertain. Who is the enigmatic Maria that Lipa still feels when she’s gone? Her Jolene-esque track “Maria” carries the familiar pop trope of a vaguely Sapphic fixation with her ex-partner's new flame. In the chorus, Lipa's impassioned cries —"Maria! I know you're gone, but I feel ya when we're alone"—echo with a profound curiosity and emotional evolution that permeates the album, resonating on nearly every track.

At its core, Radical Optismism is drenched in pop tradition whose fresh dancy hits like “Illusion” and “Houdini” will become soundtracks to our summers. Although the album's sonic palette falls yet again under the pop star's signature dance pop category, Lipa's vocals exude the pop freshness and confidence that will continue solidifying her journey into becoming one of pop music's most influential figures today.

This album comes as Miley Cyrus’s Endless Summer Vacation’s little sister from its aquatic sun dazed visuals, the themes of hope and reckless romance to its synth-heavy outros, it is not the red and pink sunset record that was promised but an exploration of how it feels to take off your rose-tinted glasses and roll with the reality of it all.