Who better than Dua Lipa to elevate pop, a genre that is so short of fresh ideas while old hits continue to clutter the charts? On her highly anticipated fourth album, all we know is that Dua Lipa is recording it because she has posted studio photos and others have photographed her leaving, specifically from Electric Lady Studios.
What clues do these photos offer? Few, but we know she has at least been working with a renowned producer, Greg Kurstin, tagged in one of his posts, and also with Ali Tamposi, known for co-writing ‘Break My Heart’ for Dua Lipa herself, as well as songs for artists like Miley Cyrus, Camila Cabello, 5 Seconds of Summer, or Shawn Mendes. She has also collaborated with the Canadian poet and singer Mustafa, with whom she has been seen dining. And she was recently seen with Troye Sivan, but they have been friends for a long time.
It’s impossible to predict what the next Dua Lipa record will sound like, but we can conclude that it will arrive in 2027. The industry-connected Hits Daily Double recently published that the album is expected to land in “early 2027” and, moreover, named Dua Lipa among the strongest contenders to headline next year’s Coachella edition. Dua Lipa won’t headline a festival without a new album on the market, or at least that’s what we’d like to believe.
Curiously, another name in the running is her friend and collaborator Tame Impala, who is killing it with ‘Dracula’ and ‘Loser’, but also indirectly with ‘Training Season’, one of Dua Lipa’s singles produced by him, which has gone viral on TikTok in recent months.
‘Training Season’ originally spoke of stopping the waste of time with men who needed to be shown how to behave like the partner one wanted, but now the internet has turned it into a romance-manifesto 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 something of a premonition about her relationship with Callum Turner.
The phenomenon has been enough to bring ‘Training Season’ back onto the charts more than two years after its release. It is currently in Spotify’s global top 20 and even aiming for a new peak, number 2 on the Billboard Global 200, after its original peak was number 6. It is yet another example of how TikTok can resurrect a song that had run its commercial course.
That aside, it should not give us too obvious a hint about the sound of the next album. That would be too predictable. Dua Lipa isn’t known for reinventing the musical wheel, but for delivering sophisticated productions, especially in her disco-funky side, and one would expect her fourth album to continue offering quality pop. Ideally, an evolution.
What there is room for improvement on is ‘Radical Optimism’, an album that in the end wasn’t the flop many predicted, but did represent an artistic sidestep for Dua Lipa. Between bolder productions like ‘Houdini’ or the very ‘Training Season’, what the album offered was a rather bland collection of commercially friendly pop, accessible to all audiences, with little that felt radical.
The fourth Dua Lipa album should offer a clearer view of who she is as a person and as an artist. And here again is ‘Training Season’: a song that in 2024 spoke of seeking someone who could measure up and that in 2026, after her marriage to Callum Turner, seems almost written in hindsight. In fact, 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 searching and desire, but about the complexities of a relationship and its quieter, more silent aspects.
Given that she has just married Callum Turner, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to expect an album devoted to wedded happiness, marked by the sophisticated and beautiful sound of the Italian vacations she loves. Could that Vogue Italia feature be a clue? Dua has just appeared on TikTok saying that the “holiday season isn’t over yet,” and nothing would please us more than if her next record evokes wonderful holidays. A honeymoon, at least.
