Once you’ve got through the darker, more industrial sound of “Houdini” and “Training Season,” the record opens up into a kaleidoscopic, summer-ready selection of pop delights. There’s the bittersweet “These Walls,” with its call-and-response chorus charting the dissolution of a toxic relationship, or the lolloping funk bassline and ABBA-esque melodies of “Whatcha Doing,” which sees her question the head-spinning effects of a new lover’s seductions. (If control is my religion / And I’m headin’ for collision / Lost my 20/20 vision,” she croons.)
While most of the songs seem to chart an old love ending and a new one beginning, it says a lot about Lipa’s ability to balance the intense public interest in her personal life—it only takes a quick Google to discover who she’s dated over the past few years—with a kind of carefully engineered unknowability. The prevailing (and evidently highly successful) approach to scoring a chart-topping single for the past few years has been to balance the confessional and the cryptic: to sprinkle enough clues and Easter eggs to keep the gossip blogs whirring and their rabid fanbases combing through every lyric, and thus to ensure their place in the public conversation. Instead, on Radical Optimism, Lipa seems to take her cues from a different generation of divas—Minogue being one of them—who have, for the most part, drawn a line in the sand between their songwriting and their personal lives. (Great pop, you could argue, is universal, not “relatable.”)
That’s not to say the album doesn’t have personality, however. More than ever before, Lipa leans into her sense of humor, notably on the deliciously tongue-in-cheek Europudding bangers “French Exit” and “Maria.” The former’s shuffle beat and bouncy guitar line serve as a delightful backdrop to one of the record’s more bonkers moments, as she intones the title in a knowingly silly French accent, while the latter features Spanish guitar and the subtle clack of castanets, as she sings her gratitude to the fiery former ex of her current partner for teaching him to be the lover he is today. (You could also argue that the album cover and title in combination carry a touch of wry humor: it would certainly require a very radical sense of optimism to be leaning back and staring down a shark in open water in the casual way Lipa appears to be.)