Dua Lipa – Illusion

The pool in this video is the same one Kylie Minogue used for “Slow.”

The Piscina Municipal de Montjuïc in Barcelona has a specific job in pop video history. Kylie Minogue filmed Slow there. Two decades later Dua Lipa, who has named Minogue among her favourite pop idols, filmed Illusion at the same pool — dancers, high divers, synchronized swimmers, and a closing shot of Lipa climbing a human tower built in the style of a Catalan castell. It is not a coincidence and nobody involved has pretended it was.

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The song came first, and by Lipa’s own account it came easily in a way the rest of the record did not. Illusion was the first thing she wrote with the full team assembled for Radical Optimism — Caroline Ailin, Danny L Harle, Tobias Jesso Jr. and Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, whose 2015 album Currents she has cited as a major influence on this era of her music. She has described the song as breaking the ice for the whole album, the one that told her the collaboration was going to work.

Parker and Harle produced it, and the writing group is an unusual one for an artist operating at Lipa’s chart level — less a pop factory than a small committee of people from adjacent, slightly leftfield corners of music, assembled because she wanted a specific sound rather than a guaranteed hit. Warner released it on April 11, 2024 as the third single from the album, following Houdini and Training Season, ahead of the full record on May 3.

A tower, built the hard way

Tanu Muino directed the video, and the closing sequence is the thing people remember. Castells are a real Catalan tradition — teams build human towers several people high, topped by a child who climbs to the summit and raises a hand to mark the tower’s completion. The video borrows the structure and the tension of it directly, with Lipa herself taking the climb. It is a specific regional reference rather than generic acrobatics, and it sits in the same Barcelona pool that already carried one piece of pop iconography before Lipa arrived.

Lipa has talked about the song’s lyric as being about knowingly walking into something you understand is a trick, and choosing to stay in it anyway because the game itself is the point. That reading fits the video’s own structure — synchronized performers, choreographed precision, a tower that could fall and does not, all of it staged as spectacle that announces itself as spectacle.

Three singles, three top tens

It debuted at No. 9 on the UK Singles Chart on April 19, 2024, the third consecutive top-ten single from Radical Optimism — a run that started with Houdini and continued through Training Season. Billboard later placed it 57th on its list of the 100 best songs of 2024, one of several entries from an album built to be performed live, on the largest stages Lipa could get herself onto.