Where does Dua Lipas feel-good music fit in our feel-bad world?

In popland, the ruling class continues to make album covers at sea. The artwork for SZA’s long-tail blockbuster, 2022’s “SOS,” finds the singer plopped on a plank, gazing out at an oceanic vastness meant to represent our alienating and unknowable world. On the cover of Billie Eilish’s upcoming “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” the pop star is submerged in dark water, sinking into a liquid dream. As for the cover of Dua Lipa’s latest, “Radical Optimism,” it was photographed at the waterline, depicting the 28-year-old from the shoulders up in golden evening wear, staring down a shark’s dorsal fin as it slices in her direction. If this image isn’t trying to evoke a scene from an old James Bond movie, it’s a comment on optimism in an age of grievance and paranoia, right? The glass is half full, but the water is still teeming with stuff that wants to kill you.

Or maybe even that read is too cynical. Nobody’s out for blood on “Radical Optimism,” especially not the woman holding the microphone, whose melodic buoyancy and lyrical comity feel like stealth counterprogramming to all the sour grapes piling up inside today’s tower of song. You know who I’m talking about. Taylor Swift is mad at her exes. Beyoncé is mad at awards shows. Drake and Kendrick Lamar are mad at each other. Blah-blah-blah, boohoo. It would have been so easy for Lipa to swoop into this miserable scene like Glinda the Good Witch in disco pants, but thankfully, she doesn’t. The songs on “Radical Optimism” have a pep that’s never goody-goody or try-hard, no matter how out of sync this music might be with the dank mood wafting up and down the pop charts. Obviously, refusing to feel sorry for yourself on the Hot 100 isn’t radical, but there’s still some kind of statement being made here.

Also, watching someone jump too high over a low bar can be fun. “I don’t believe that every flame has to get colder,” Lipa sings in “Falling Forever,” the most heart-swollen moment on this otherwise highly aerodynamic collection of up-and-down love songs. Even the breakup tracks lean brisk and danceable. “We call it love but hate it here,” Lipa sings in the galloping “These Walls” — and check out how she can’t sing the word “hate” in the song’s second verse without putting a squeaky little teakettle puff on it. She needs that heavy word for the story she’s telling, but she won’t allow the English language to drag the music down. Her production team — a cast that includes Kevin Parker of Tame Impala and Tobias Jesso Jr. — are every bit as detail-minded, and all together, everyone keeps their heads bowed to the ’80s, evoking Tina Turner on “Whatcha Doing,” Prince on “Anything for Love” and some iteration of Madonna nearly everywhere else.

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A recent cover story in Rolling Stone recounts Lipa’s meticulous studio habits, but far more revealing was the singer’s explanation of how her parents fleeing Kosovo in the early 1990s instilled in her a solidarity with those displaced in Israel’s war on Gaza. “I feel for people who have to leave their home,” Lipa said. “From my experience of being in Kosovo and understanding what war does, no one really wants to leave their home. They do it for protection, to save their family, to look after the people around them, that kind of thing, for a better life. So I feel close to it.”

So she’s worldly. And empathetic. And aware. She has a position on the state of our messed-up, freaked-out society. But if Lipa doesn’t put any of those thoughts and beliefs directly into her lyrics, are they still in her music somewhere? Maybe I’m the one being too optimistic now, but I say yes. There’s an inherent generosity in creating something reliable and well-crafted in a chaotic and careless world — a world in which the powerful disgrace us all through war and injustice, but also in which there are still car stereos, and karaoke machines, and spin classes, and Friday nights, and strangers to dance with. Good pop music need not save the world, just improve it. Even just a little.

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