What’s This Playlist All About? The music-history scholars over at Pitchfork sift through Dua Lipa’s 2020 album, Future Nostalgia—a cathartic master thesis on liberation achieved through disco and dance—to dig up its key influences and source material.
What You Get: A formidable brigade of dance-pop deities, with no-brainer selections from Madonna (who makes this playlist twice), Grace Jones, Pet Shop Boys, and Kylie Minogue. In between such euphoric club standards as “Hung Up” and “Always on My Mind,” you get plenty of ’80s and ’90s pop gold, like Olivia Newton-John’s calorie-burning “Physical” (an inspiration for Lipa’s own “Physical”), INXS’s steamy groove “Need You Tonight” (which Lipa samples on “Break My Heart”), and Crystal Waters’ hippie house hit “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless).”
Greatest Pick: One of the few male artists represented here, White Town (a.k.a. Jyoti Mishra), with his gender- and genre-bending theme “Your Woman,” oddly fits in with Lipa’s own irresistible pop. In fact, she interpolates its sampled horn riff on “Love Again.”
Best Song to Dance Your Heart Out To: The final track here, Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” will win this competition—always—and actually goes quite well alongside Lipa’s own disco dance-floor burner “Don’t Start Now.”
