Dua Lipa

The English singer who rebuilt disco for contemporary radio and made it sound like the present tense. Born in London in 1995 to Kosovo-Albanian parents, Lipa worked as a model before signing with Warner Bros. Records in 2014. Her self-titled debut arrived in 2017, reached No. 3 on the UK Albums Chart, and produced Be the One, IDGAF and the UK No. 1 New Rules. Future Nostalgia followed in 2020, taking late-seventies dancefloor production and early-eighties synth-pop and assembling something that worked on streaming playlists without apologizing for where it came from. Radical Optimism arrived in 2024.

The Brit Awards named her British Female Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act in 2018, and the Recording Academy gave her Best New Artist the following year. Future Nostalgia won the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album in 2021. In June 2024 she headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, the ambition she had stated publicly years before she was in any position to deliver it, and weeks earlier she had gone back to the BBC's Maida Vale Studios for a Radio 1 Live Lounge special — the same room where she had performed her first uncharted single eight years before.