Last Monday Dua Lipa announced that her second album was going to come out early. “I hope it brings you some happiness,” she said, with ideal timing. This month, in a review of Lady Gaga’s enormously enjoyable comeback single, Stupid Love, one critic wrote that the song filled “a void in our downcast landscape”, adding that the only other artist like Gaga right now is the British pop star Lipa. Her music, the review said, is “big, bright, heart-on-sleeve. There’s an appetite for this kind of exuberant sound.”
Lipa gasps when she hears about the Gaga review and looks delighted, if shocked, even a little daunted, which is not her natural mode. The comparison between the two singers makes sense, though. Lipa’s eponymous debut
