Dua Lipa’s new album, Future Nostalgia, is an ode to good memories and a gateway to Zumba. Josie Adams listened to it and took a heady trip into her past.

We’re only three months in, but I’m calling it now: Future Nostalgia will be one of the best pop records released this decade. It’s dropped slightly earlier than anticipated, in part because of an unfortunate album leak, but also because old mate Dua correctly thought we could use some joy right now. And straight off the bat: this album gives a lot of joy. 

As the title hints, Dua Lipa isn’t interested in just looking backwards. Her nostalgia is one that operates independent of time; she’s wistful for loves both lost in the past and blossoming in the future. And although the album’s early singles set expectations high, Dua and her team smashed those expectations into the basement and boarded them over with planks carved from the skeleton of pre-2020 pop music, because she killed it.

To honour its arrival and the artistic intent of its creator, I gave the record a listen and explained what each song made me nostalgic for — past, present and, of course, future.

Future Nostalgia

The album’s opening and title track starts out reminding me of an ‘80s pick-a-path video game soundtrack, but by the bridge I know I’m actually listening to the soundtrack for a (currently) nonexistent Paul Feig-directed adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Some of the other songs on the album veer towards almost vaporwave-esque pop, but the synths on this one are explicitly ‘80s electro. It reminds me of my time spent as an elite hacker, surfing the mainframe and crunching bugs.

Don’t Start Now

This song reminds me of four months ago when I first heard it and decided to get a gym membership. Probing deeper, it makes me nostalgic for the few fleeting moments in my life where I’ve exhibited emotional strength. There’s a wooden clap that manifests somewhere in the middle of the song that takes me to a breezy field, with a horse, on which I will ride away from my problems.

Cool

Gentle synth turns into hard drums — is this what they call “new wave”? Because I’m surfing it. I’m riding this gnarly wave all the way back to 2003 and buying a HitClip that I will play outside my Year 6 paramour’s classroom. It’s actually just plain old pop music, and it bangs. This song takes me back to the lovelorn mania Dua Lipa is experiencing without putting my heart rate in the anxiety danger zone, which I appreciate.

Physical

I was getting a certain vibe from the aesthetics of ‘Don’t Start Now’, and now it’s confirmed: Dua Newton John is in the house. Lipa’s ‘80s nostalgia is a little Aussie-inspired, and I love that for her. I’m visualising a glossy tanning oil sheen and a fight outside a Les Mills. I’m smelling the intoxicating vanilla musk of my teenage deodorant. I’m praying that Dua Lipa will one day appear in a live TV musical.

Levitating

“My love is like a rocket, watch it blast off,” is a great lyric in any context, but in a crisp English accent wedged in the white space between some really funky riffs, it takes you to a wedding reception with an open bar. This is all about the first blushes of love, and at this point in the album I’m having future nostalgia for the peppy whirlwind summer romance Dua Lipa and I will share, or at least the one that she’ll kindly soundtrack for me.

Pretty Please

As soon as the bassline starts bumpin on this track, I’m transported back in time, either to New York in the ’80s, or the time in 2005 when my sister and I took ‘MTV-style’ dance classes with the ex-wife of Kid Creole from Kid Creole and the Coconuts. I don’t recall how or why I’m here, but I’m having a helluva good time.

Hallucinate

This is so good I feel like I must have hallucinated it, because surely no living mortal could create such a vibe. It takes me back to being 19, needing no sleep, jazzed on Cindy’s, walking 40 miles uphill in freezing snow just to get to a Dunedin house party — and loving it.

Love Again

A lush violin intro melds seamlessly with a sample from White Town’s 90s hit ‘Your Woman,’ which is one of my favourite songs, and God damn, you’ve got me in love again, Dua Lipa. I’m flashing back to the beautiful crescendo of every love story in my life tapestry. It’s the first time I saw the Bachelorette, Dr Lesina Nakhid-Schuster. Why did you play me this way?

Break My Heart

It starts with an INXS bass riff, so you already know what this throws back to: my own personal fashion inspiration, Michael Hutchence. With luscious curls, dirty basslines, and sinfully deep-cut shirts — how could Dua Lipa’s heart not be broken? If she’s looking for an antipodean stud to treat her terribly, I volunteer. ‘Break My Heart’ makes me think about my choices and realise that, yes, they’re bad, but they’re kinda nice with it.

Good In Bed

Musically, this is a slight departure from the rest of the album. It’s staccato piano-led and snarky, so it’s a definite British vibe — no accent required to pin down this song’s geography. It’s also filthy. Smutty. It reminds me of the staircase at my old apartment in Edinburgh, where the shadows gave off a sexy air but hid some serious health and safety hazards.

Boys Will be Boys

The album’s closing track is another one that takes us out of the dance studio. The violin-and-piano combo is a classic for swelling hearts with profound inspiration, but unlike most anthems this pulls not one single punch. It would have gone off at my all-girls high school; a throwback to the heady days of inspirational Tumblr reblogs and Upworthy shares on Facebook. It might make you want to run up a mountain, which is a bit difficult for now, but powerful lights-off living room dancing should work just fine.

Like Benee, BBNO$ and about a thousand other acts that suddenly became superstars in the last 18 months, Ashnikko is blowing up off the back of a TikTok craze. But dig a little deeper and you’ll see that there’s much more to this blue-haired rapper than Miley Cyrus memes. 

Barely a second into the intro, you get a pretty solid indicator of what’s on the way: a clapped-out synth bassline and a sharp-edged trap beat, underneath a solitary voice repeatedly screaming ‘WET’ on the track like its owner is trying to summon the ghosts of our crunkcore kings Brokencyde. The song is called ‘STUPID’, the voice belongs to a 23-year-old London-based rapper called Ashnikko, and like an increasing number of out-of-nowhere smash hits of late, it’s one which found its first major audience on that most democratic of platforms: I’m talking about TikTok, baby. 

But as anyone who’s ever spent a long, fruitless afternoon neglecting crucial responsibilities and trying to nail yet another hellish dance challenge can attest, landing a TikTok hit is a lot less simple than that sentence may sound. So how did ‘STUPID’ blow up? And why? And who exactly is the diminutive blue-haired rapper behind it? All of these questions, and at least 1.5 more, sort-of-answered below.

First, I implore thee: what is an Ashnikko and whom hath summoned it?

Ashnikko, as mentioned above, is a young rapper operating out of England’s capital, although she’s called a few places home – born in North Carolina, she grew up stateside then spent the bulk of her teens in Estonia and Latvia, before moving slightly west at age 18. She’s been making music since the mid-2010s, and for the most part it’s all been pretty consistent both in style and quality – if you’re looking for an easy primer, her four-track 2017 debut Sass Pancakes gives a pretty complete prototype of her contemporary sound, splitting the difference between the extreme luridity of Brooke Candy and the hard-edged delivery of Rico Nasty. 

So why did ‘STUPID’ blow up?

Why does the sun rise? Why does the world turn? Why do I keep buying headphones on deferred finance and then leaving them at the gym? Truly, it seems that some of this life’s mysteries are beyond solving. If I were to hazard a guess, though, I’d give equal credit to the track’s playful abrasiveness – similar to acts like the aforementioned Ms Nasty or art-pop weirdos du jour 100 gecs, its extreme heaviness doesn’t come at the expense of melody – and the incongruity of Ashnikko’s saccharine delivery against her low-level toxic lyrics; pro-ghosting lines like “Nothing about you is attractive to me now / Blocking you, avoiding you actively right now” may not constitute great life advice, but is there truly any human who can’t relate? That’s not a rhetorical question, the answer is no.

It’s easy to overstate the role of individual clips as catalysts for this type of blow-up, but it does also seem fair to say that Miley Cyrus played some part in its rise – the track was already blowing up on the platform itself, but Miley using the song to introduce new boyfriend Cody Simpson to Tiktok automatically meant that the virality became a little more mainstream.

As far as Ashnikko herself is concerned, she’s said that “for the most part” she thinks that the nature of the song’s buzz is true to the spirit in which she wrote it. Speaking to Fader at the end of last year, she said she’s proud of what ‘Stupid’ has ended up meaning to people, “It’s a breakup song, basically,” she told David Renshaw, “and it feels like it’s become something like a confidence song, which I really like — a “sing in front of your mirror with a hairbrush” type of song.”

Does all her stuff sound like this?

I’m so glad you asked! Because no, not really! If anything, Hi, It’s Me, the 2019 EP that ‘STUPID’ is lifted from, presents Ashnikko as an almost-surprisingly well-rounded artist – albeit an extremely on-trend one. Her stylistic touchpoint here range from the overdriven power pop of Sleigh Bells, or Charli XCX’s more bombastic moments (the title track) to the era-defining Bay Area bounce of DJ Mustard (‘Special’, ‘Working Bitch’), giving the overall impression of an artist who’s definitely aware of what’s hot in music, even if she doesn’t necessarily obliged to stay in any one particular lane.

Part of that is probably down to what seems like a pretty healthy working relationship between Ashnikko and her production partners. ‘Working Bitch’ and ‘Manners’ see return appearances from previous collaborators CallMeTheKidd and Jason Julian respectively, while ‘STUPID’ is produced and co-written by Oscar Scheller, a buzzed-about artist in his own right and someone who she’s already worked with a few times prior. The results are varied, but the consistent through-line is an artist who sounds just as comfortable with borderline balladry as she does with sex raps. Which, frankly, is the kind of versatility that 2020 demands.

I have decided to stan. Now what?

I’m so happy to hear that, and I also have good news for you: by all indications, Ashnikko’s not planning to switch up her approach too substantially anytime soon. She’s apparently got new work in the pipe, telling Billboard in November that 2020 will see her “making a lot of cool music with a lot of really cool people … I’m just going to be throwing so much music out into the world,” but in the meantime she’s just trying to keep the buzz bus rolling – just today she dropped chaotic new single ‘Tantrum’, and with last week seeing the announcement that she’ll soon be joining fellow Tik Tok superstar Doja Cat for a full US tour, it seems pretty likely that you’ll be hearing a lot more from her in the not-too-distant future. Maybe keep an eye on Tik Tok, just in case.