Dua Lipa (born 22 August 1995) is a British and Albanian singer and songwriter. Her accolades include seven Brit Awards and three Grammy Awards. Time magazine included her in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2024.
Lipa worked as a model before signing a recording contract with Warner Bros. in 2014. She rose to prominence with her eponymous debut album in 2017, which peaked at number three on the UK Albums Chart and spawned the singles “Be the One”, “IDGAF”, and the UK number-one single “New Rules”. Lipa was honoured with the Brit Awards for British Female Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. Her second number-one single, “One Kiss” with Calvin Harris, was the best-selling song of 2018 in the UK and won the Brit Award for Song of the Year. In 2019, she won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist and for Best Dance Recording for “Electricity”, her collaborative single with Silk City.
Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia (2020), became her first UK number-one album, and won the Brit Award for British Album of the Year and the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album. Its lead single, “Don’t Start Now”, scored the longest top-ten stay for a British female artist on the UK Singles Chart and ranked in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 year-end chart of 2020. The album’s success continued with the follow-up singles “Physical”, “Break My Heart”, and “Levitating”, the last of which topped the Billboard year-end Hot 100 chart of 2021 and was certified diamond in the US by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Lipa subsequently scored her third and fourth UK number-one singles with the 2021 Elton John duet “Cold Heart (Pnau remix)” and “Dance the Night” from the soundtrack of the film Barbie (2023), wherein she also made her acting debut.
In 2024, Lipa released her third studio album, Radical Optimism, which debuted atop the UK Albums Chart and was preceded by the UK top-ten singles “Houdini”, “Training Season”, and “Illusion”. She also had a supporting role in the spy film Argylle. Lipa, as one of the wealthiest people in the UK, was included in the Sunday Times Rich List for 2024, with an estimated net worth of £90 million.
Early life
Dua Lipa was born on 22 August 1995, in London, the eldest child of Kosovo Albanian parents Anesa (née Rexha) and Dukagjin Lipa from Pristina, FR Yugoslavia (present-day Kosovo). Her maternal grandmother is of Bosniak descent.
Lipa’s ancestry can be traced back to the city of Peja, Kosovo. Both of her grandfathers were historians. She has a sister, Rina, and a brother, Gjin. Lipa was musically influenced by her father, who was the lead singer and guitarist of the Kosovan rock band Oda. Her father continued to play music at home, including his own compositions and songs of artists such as David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Sting, the Police, and Stereophonics. Dua Lipa began singing at the age of five.
Lipa grew up in West Hampstead, London. She attended Fitzjohn’s Primary School and her music lessons there included the cello. When she auditioned to enter the school choir, the teacher told her that “she could not sing”. At the age of nine, she began weekend singing lessons at the Sylvia Young Theatre School. Lipa moved with her family to Pristina after Kosovo declared independence in 2008. There she attended Mileniumi i Tretë School, learned more about the Albanian language, and considered a music career.
At age 15, Lipa moved back alone to London and shared a flat with a family friend. At Parliament Hill School she passed her A-Levels, then re-entered Sylvia Young Theatre School part-time. She uploaded her own songs to SoundCloud and YouTube. She began posting videos of herself covering songs such as “If I Ain’t Got You” (2004) by Alicia Keys and “Beautiful” (2002) by Christina Aguilera on YouTube. Lipa modelled with Topshop and signed with a modelling agency, helping her land a role as a singer in an ITV advertisement for The X Factor in 2013, covering the song “Lost in Music” (1979). She acquired a producer and a manager.
Career
2013–2018: Career beginnings and Dua Lipa
Lipa in 2016
In 2013, Lipa signed a contract with Tap Management, directed by Ben Mawson and Ed Millett, while working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. Lipa was introduced to Mawson by her lawyer, who discouraged her from signing another publishing deal that was offered to her. They then offered her a monthly salary to leave her job and focus on recording music. During one of the sessions Lipa co-wrote the song “Hotter than Hell”, which led to her signing a record deal with Warner Bros. Records in 2014. Millett retrospectively elaborated: “Dua was really smart–she signed to Warner Bros. partly because they didn’t have a big female pop artist and they needed one. They really wanted her, so she had the focus of the team from day one.
In August 2015, Lipa released her first single, “New Love”, produced by Emile Haynie and Andrew Wyatt. Her second single, “Be the One”, was issued to European success in October 2015, reaching number one in Belgium, Poland and Slovakia, as well as charting in the top ten in over eleven European territories. In Australia and New Zealand, the song became an airplay success, reaching numbers 6 and 20 respectively. In November 2015, she was revealed as one of the acts to appear on the BBC Sound of… 2016 long list.
We’ve seen artists who might get half a good song out of 10 writing sessions; with Dua, one in five or one in four is a banger. She gets results out of other people as well, because her personality is so engaging and she is so charismatic. She definitely has that special something.
Ben Mawson on Lipa’s songwriting
Her first tour in the UK and Europe began in January 2016, and concluded in early December 2016. On 18 February 2016, Lipa released her third single, “Last Dance”, followed by “Hotter than Hell” on 6 May. The latter was successful particularly in the UK, where it peaked at number 15. On 26 August, her fifth overall single, “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)”, was released, peaking at number 30 in the UK. It became the singer’s first entry on the US Billboard Hot 100, debuting at number 72. The song also topped the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart and reached number 23 on the Billboard Mainstream Top 40 chart.
Lipa was featured on Sean Paul’s single “No Lie”, released in November 2016, which reached number ten in the UK. The song became a top-ten hit in ten countries six years after its release, and it became Sean Paul’s most-streamed song as of December 2022. The music video (directed by Tim Nackashi) surpassed 1 billion views on YouTube in April 2022. The following month, a documentary about Lipa named See in Blue was commissioned by The Fader. In January 2017, Lipa won the EBBA Public Choice Award, and released the single “Scared to Be Lonely”, a collaboration with Martin Garrix, reaching number 14 in the UK.
In May 2017, she performed at the anniversary of Indonesian television channel SCTV and won the award for Young and Promising International Artist at the SCTV Music Awards. Lipa’s first album Dua Lipa was released on 2 June 2017. Its sixth single, “New Rules”, released in the following month, became Lipa’s first number one in the UK, and the first by a female solo artist to reach the top in the UK since Adele’s “Hello” in 2015. Her best-selling single to date, the song also charted in the top ten of other countries, including number two in Australia, number six in the US, and number seven in Canada. As of 2024, the music video has streamed over three billion views on YouTube. Lipa performed at the Glastonbury Festival in June. In July, Lipa performed at the We The Fest, an Indonesian music festival in Jakarta. She performed on the BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland in October. In December, Lipa was named the most streamed woman of 2017 in the UK by Spotify. She had four singles reach the UK top 10 in 2017, with “Be the One”, “New Rules”, “No Lie”, and “Bridge over Troubled Water”, a charity single for the families of the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in London.
In January 2018, Lipa received nominations in five categories at the Brit Awards, more nominations than any other artist that year. She was nominated for MasterCard British Album of the Year for Dua Lipa, British Single of the Year and British Video of the Year for “New Rules”, British Female Solo Artist, and British Breakthrough Act winning the latter two. This was the first time that a female artist had received five nominations.
Lipa performed at the awards ceremony held on 21 February at the O2 Arena in London. The singer collaborated with American DJ Whethan on the song “High” for the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack, released in February 2018. She started working on new material for her second album in January 2018. On 6 April, Lipa and Calvin Harris released the single “One Kiss”, which topped the UK Singles Chart on 20 April, making it Lipa’s second number one in the chart; Lipa provided the vocals and is also credited as a writer. The single went on to become the biggest selling song in the UK of 2018 and topped the chart for eight consecutive weeks. She performed in the opening ceremony of the 2018 UEFA Champions League Final in Kyiv on 26 May. It was reported that Lipa would be releasing collaborations with other artists coming out later in 2018, such as one with Mark Ronson and Diplo’s newly formed superduo Silk City. Ronson later confirmed the song’s title would be “Electricity”. The song was released on 9 September. Lipa was also featured in “If Only”, a song from Italian singer Andrea Bocelli’s sixteenth studio album Sì.
2023–present: Acting debut and Radical Optimism
On 26 May 2023, Lipa released “Dance the Night” as the lead single of the Barbie film soundtrack. Lipa made her acting debut in the movie, portraying Mermaid Barbie. In November 2023, Lipa acquired full ownership of all her songs, music, and publishing rights, in a new deal she completed with her former music publishers, TaP Music. The deal included all of her master recordings from her entire music catalogue, which by February 2024, had reached 40 billion streams.
On 9 November 2023, Lipa released the lead single from her third studio album titled “Houdini”. On the day of its release, she said that Kevin Parker, who produced the song with Danny L Harle, was among her “core collaborators” on the album. Spin referred to Harle as the co-producer of the record. The follow-up singles, “Training Season” and “Illusion”, were released on 15 February 2024 and 11 April 2024, respectively. The album titled Radical Optimism followed on 3 May 2024. She continued her acting career with a starring role in the 2024 spy action comedy Argylle.
In March 2024, Dua Lipa announced she would do a short tour of European arenas in June of the same year. She is set to perform at the Arena of Nîmes, the Waldbühne in Berlin and the Pula Arena, all of which are amphitheatres. In June, she headlined at Glastonbury Festival 2024, closing the festival’s Pyramid Stage on 28 June.
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