Dua Lipa’s Next Musical Era Will Commence With New Single ‘Houdini’

Thania Garcia
·3 min read
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Following weeks of cryptic teasers and unsolved riddles, Dua Lipa has officially confirmed her new single “Houdini” will be arriving on Nov. 9

There was somewhat of an indication that Dua was close to releasing new music as a part of her much-buzzed-about new record when she wiped her Instagram and TikTok accounts of any previous content. She also replaced her profile picture on Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter), along with the thumbnails on her streaming channels, with similar kaleidoscope-esque images.

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Earlier this week, she also began posting numerical riddles and video clips of her with a gold key in her mouth that led many to believe the single’s (at the time unannounced) title nodded to Harry Houdini, the Hungarian-American illusionist artist.

Dua’s last album was the Grammy award-winning “Future Nostalgia,” a March 2020 release. The latter gave way to pop radio mainstays like “Don’t Start Now” and “Levitating,” and Dua has been teasing her third album since early 2022 when she told Elton John on her “Dua Lipa: At Your Service podcast” that it was halfway finished.

However, “it’s taken a complete turn as I’ve carried on working, and I really feel now that it’s starting to sound cohesive,” she told Variety late last year. “So I’m going to keep writing in the early months of the new year and see where that takes me. The album is different — it’s still pop but it’s different sonically, and there’s more of a lyrical theme. If I told you the title, everything would make sense — but I think we’ll just have to wait.”

There has been very little solid information in the 11 months since that conversation. One source told Variety earlier this year that she had been working with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker (which may or may not be what she was referencing when she described the music to the New York Times in August as “1970s psychedelia”) as well as several producers and writers who’d worked on “Future Nostalgia.”

She worked with hit producer Mark Ronson on her fifth career top 10 hit “Dance The Night,” for the “Barbie” soundtrack, released over the summer. This August, Dua also appeared as the cover star for the New York Times Magazine and confirmed the album would be released this year.

That article also included some sonic teasers, like the fact that she doesn’t want to “alienate” her fans from her old sound, although she’s “developing a new sound that may be informed less by the house and disco beats beneath songs like ‘Physical’ and ‘Hallucinate’ than by 1970s-era psychedelia,” the publication wrote.

Additional reporting by Jem Aswad.

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