Dua Lipa Reveals Her Favorite Spice Girl & the ‘Chaos’ That Inspired ‘Radical Optimism’

Dua Lipa is gearing up to release her upcoming album, Radical Optimism, and she sat down with Billboard‘s Tetris Kelly to discuss the inspiration behind the project.

“[Releasing the album] feels good. It feels for lack of a better word — radically optimistic,” she shared, before explaining the idea behind the album cover, which features the singer floating in a wide open ocean facing a shark fin. “Throughout the whole record, there’s this idea of chaos happening around and me trying to push through it in a way that feels authentic and honest to me.”

The upcoming LP features her already released singles “Houdini” and “Training Season,” the latter of which Lipa says started out as a “joke” in the studio. “I’d been on a couple of dates, like a string of bad dates,” she recalled. “I went into the studio and was like, ‘Right, I’m done. I don’t want to meet anyone. Training season is over. I’m done training these boys.’”

As a British girl, Lipa is, of course, a fan of the Spice Girls, and revealed how she never got to portray her favorite member of the group on the elementary school playground. “I always wanted to be Baby Spice, but no one wanted to let me be Baby Spice because I wasn’t blonde,” she said. “It was a playground hierarchy. It was like, ‘Alright, you get to be Posh.’”

The 11-track Radical Optimism — Lipa’s first proper LP since 2020’s Future Nostalgia — arrives May 3. Watch the full interview above.