What’s Next, Dua Lipa?

Dua Lipa is at an interesting crossroads in her career. She has already established herself as one of the most recognizable international pop stars around and has maintained a presence in the gossip ecosystem with her friendships and her romances and now her marriage. From the massive success of her sophomore album Future Nostalgia and the mixed reception of her follow-up Radical Optimism, her upcoming fourth album arrives at an intriguing moment. The latter may not have sold as much than her previous effort, but her name and likeness have both remained relevant and she was able to breathe new life into an album cycle that initially fell short of expectations. With her star power undiminished, her upcoming album puts her in a unique position to create another important era in pop music.  

Before getting ahead to album four however, it’s important to understand how she successfully changed the narrative surrounding her musical return. Radical Optimism didn’t produce any top 10 singles in the USA, and the album missed the #1 spot. However, she stayed the course, believed in the project and eventually the songs on this album have earned a respectable run. Her 2024 single “Training Season” is leading the charge here, currently earning a whopping 1.6 MILLION streams a day at the time of writing. I wrote about the manifestation trend that helped make the song go viral earlier this year, and a few months later the song has become her highest streamed song of 2026, passing one billion streams.

What’s especially intriguing is that it isn’t just the standard version that has gone viral, but rather the live version from her 2024 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall. This version is far more dramatic, complete with a new intro, powerful live vocals, and full orchestra – oh and that version is earning Dua an additional 900k daily streams. In my opinion, the Radical Optimism tour in 2025 and the accompanying live albums (she did two of them) are what saved the era from being considered a “flop” because it helped fans and the public at large take in the music in a different way. Along with the Albert Hall performance, she filmed the final show in Mexico City and made it available for free on YouTube for fans to indulge and discover. Dua’s live stage presence is incredible – she really has come so far from the “go girl give us nothing” meme. Very rarely do recordings from live shows do the major numbers like “Training Season” is consistently pulling in; these types of releases are generally intended to please die-hard fans.

The fact that the public is listening to the live version of a song that wasn’t even a top 10 hit in America shows that the interest is there. Could this be because of her relationship with Callum taking over our feeds? That might be part of it, given the nature of the viral trend being about manifesting your greatest love. And Dua has fed into it too. She re-released the single as an EP with both the standard and live versions of the songs in one place to help boost the streams – and it worked. She used the current trend of older songs being discovered on TikTok to her advantage. It’s the same trend (and future business model if you ask me) that has helped catalogue songs like “Babydoll” by Dominic Fike and “Cinderella” by Mac Miller become sleeper hits, as discussed in my column this week. She also has proven that a song doesn’t have to be defined by whether or not it was fully appreciated in its intended run.

In the months since both the conclusion of the Radical Optimism Tour, the viral success of “Training Season”, and her marriage to Callum, Dua has been pouring into her multiple entrepreneurial projects while simultaneously recording music for her upcoming fourth studio album. Some of these projects include the launch of her skincare brand DUA by AB; a curation of talks and events courtesy of her Service95 Book Club; and her yearly Sunny Hill Festival in Kosovo where her family’s roots run deep. She’s busy expanding her identity beyond pop stardom and establishing herself as a multifaceted businesswoman. With these business ventures flourishing, there’s arguably less pressure for her music to be the sole driving force behind her success which, I could imagine, allows for her creative juices to flow much more effectively. How this will affect the sound and lyrical content of her next album is hinted in a 2025 interview, where Dua touched on the early recording sessions of the album. She says the “sonics” of the record are inspired by being in love. I would’ve assumed as much. She has since shared easter eggs here and there surrounding the next phase, including sharing the photo below of her in the studio earlier this month.

In her August 2026 cover story with Vogue Italia Dua talked about the parallels between writing an album when she was searching for love versus now that she’s found it, even going deeper, saying that she and Callum support each other’s ambitions and that she can work on music wherever he happens to be saying “… let’s not forget that when I’m not on tour writing and recording, I can be anywhere in the world”. Basically, whether he’s James Bond or not, they will be together and she will be working on music. Music that the self-proclaimed “studio rat” has let us know is on its way. Thank God. This is especially intriguing because we are going to be seeing for the first time just how being in love has influenced her songwriting. Going back to “Training Season”, that song was about being fed up with training men on how to be gentlemen. She said it herself, “training season’s over”, now she’s about to let us know what that looks and sounds like.