The night-out frictionlessness of Dua Lipa’s brand of pop felt like a balm last night at Climate Pledge Arena, where the 30-year-old played her final of two shows at the venue. (The performance functioned as, no pun intended, an end of an era in another way: It was, as Lipa noted, the concluding North American performance of her 81-show-long Radical Optimism tour, which started in Singapore almost a year ago.)

Released in May 2024, the homonymous album this particular string of concerts is promoting was embraced with much less fanfare than Lipa’s slump-exploding sophomore effort, 2020’s Future Nostalgia. It initially seemed unfortunate that the then-edging-superstardom Lipa’s Future Nostalgia would be released so soon into COVID-mandated lockdown, but it quickly became more of a professional boon than a setback. The sugary, pretty-perfect pop album, whose songs could not be danced to in the club, became a party-in-one’s-bedroom musical lifeline for many — myself included — amid the lack of fun staying shut in inevitably created. En masse personal attachment, paired with an expectations-muddying promotional tour — she cited the likes of trip-hoppers Massive Attack and Primal Scream as particular sonic influences, and there were some indulgences in “most personal album”-adjacent characterizations — set high bars to clear for the follow-up.

Read the full review at 425.

Photo: Rodrigo DeMedeiros