Dua Lipa Has Gone Full Mysterious Barbie, Exciting Fans With An Apparent Clue That Her Third Album Is Imminent

Dua Lipa delivered “Dance The Night,” the Barbie movie theme song that became Lipa’s fifth-career top-10 Billboard Hot 100 hit (peaking at No. 6), and portrayed Mermaid Barbie in the Greta Gerwig-directed phenomenon. She would be excused to taking the rest of the year off, but instead, Lipa has taken on a new role: Mysterious Barbie.

On Monday morning, October 9, people noticed that Lipa had wiped her Instagram and TikTok grids clean — usually an artist’s signal that a new era is loading. She also changed her profile picture on Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter) to an aqua kaleidoscope-esque image. On Facebook and X, her header photo is still in the kaleidoscope lens but displaying more of a determined-looking Lipa’s face.

Lipa’s last album was the Grammy-winning Future Nostalgia, arriving in March 2020 and housing monster pop anthems like “Don’t Start Now” and “Levitating.” The 28-year-old has been teasing her third album since early 2022 when she told Elton John on her Dua Lipa: At Your Service podcast that it was “maybe 50 percent of the way” finished. By the end of last year, she told Variety that the project had “taken a complete turn,” and she planned to keep writing in early 2023.

This August, Lipa covered The New York Times’ T Magazine and gave yet another update on the fruits of her 2023 labor — this time, confirming her next album is due out in 2024. The profile’s author, Kurt Soller, provided context for what fans might be able to expect, as detailed in the following excerpt:

“The next record will still be pop, she says, lest her ‘fans have a meltdown.’ She doesn’t want to ‘alienate’ them, although she’s developing a new sound that may be informed less by the house and disco beats beneath songs like ‘Physical’ and ‘Hallucinate’ than by 1970s-era psychedelia. She’s working with a smaller group of songwriting collaborators, supposedly including Kevin Parker of the Australian psych-rock band Tame Impala, a rumor she all but confirms by denying: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says, then looks away and laughs a little. Lipa’s dressed — almost studiously — in pop star-off-duty drag: Ugg slip-ons, baggy white jeans, an old Elton John T-shirt, a few diamond-encrusted hoops in each ear.”

Based on the reactions to her social media movement, Lipa has done anything but alienate her fans. See some of the best reactions below.

Dua Lipa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.