“I’m on cloud nine!” Dua Lipa said. “I’m having the best time!”
Ms. Lipa, an English songwriter, had just performed “Scared to Be Lonely,” her single with the electronic dance music producer Martin Garrix, on “The Tonight Show,” and she was still buzzing on the adrenaline during an interview over a cup of chamomile tea at a Rockefeller Center restaurant.
The talk-show performance was one more methodical step in the internet-accelerated career of Ms. Lipa, 21, who is releasing her debut album, “Dua Lipa,” on Friday. She has already tabulated hundreds of millions of online and radio plays for her singles “Hotter Than Hell,” “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” and “Be the One,” while “Scared to Be Lonely” has garnered more than 250 million streams. On Saturday afternoon, Ms. Lipa is to perform in New York at Governors Ball on Randalls Island, starting a summer full of festival dates.
Ms. Lipa is a big-voiced, broad-stroke songwriter and performer who was raised on pop bangers and is now writing her own. Her idols are songwriters like Pink and Nelly Furtado who sling giant riffs and choruses and heart-on-sleeve verses, along with hip-hop storytellers like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole. She often describes her music as “dark pop” or “dance-crying.”
“All the sad things that happen are the things that linger on my mind the longest, the things that I feel like I want to write about,” she said. “But then at the same time I like dancing to it. So it’s finding that mixture between lyrically it being very personal and inspired by events, and then being able to also listen to it and dance along and not think about what the lyrics can mean.”
Her voice has a husky power and pungency akin to Adele, Rihanna and Pink; her songs can be vows of attraction or counterattacks in a lovers’ quarrel. “Heartbreak makes good stories, so sometimes, as much as heartbreak sucks, it makes for good writing,” she said. In “Hotter Than Hell,” she taunts a lover who can’t resist her. “We’re hot like hell/Does it burn when I’m not there?,” she sings over a thumping beat that swells into big-room electronic dance music.
Ms. Lipa wrote “Hotter Than Hell” to be “everything that somebody made me feel I wasn’t,” she said. “This guy just made me feel like I wasn’t good enough, always kicking me down in a way emotionally. And I was in the mood to write a really sad song. But when I started writing lyrics I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to let him hear how he made me feel.’ I didn’t want to show weakness — that’s not what I wanted to portray. And I was like: ‘O.K., I’m going to flip the script. I’m going to make it seem as if he couldn’t get enough of me.’ And instantly, the second I started writing, I started feeling better about the situation because I went into this imaginative world where everything had changed.”