Hey y'all, DJ Louis here just dropping a snippet of this week's Pop Pantheon All Access episode

in which Russ, Owen Myers, and myself gathered to discuss Dua Lepa's third record radical optimism,

which dropped last week. This has been a very interesting rollout to say the least, and it was

very, very telling to hear the music finally on this thing. So if you enjoy this snippet and you want

to hear the rest of this episode, you can subscribe at patreon.com slash pop pantheon, click the link in the show notes of this episode, or you can subscribe for the audio only directly in Apple Podcasts for this and weekly bonus episodes of this show. So without further ado, here's the snippet of my conversation with Owen and Russ about radical optimism.

Can I just throw two more things into the mix and have you guys respond before we actually talk about this record, which is one, I think another important ground layer is

Duolipa is in the sort of A-list pop tier of the moment unique because of what she does

being inherently different than I think what we demand of most pop stars at this moment.

As we've discussed a lot on this show, I don't think any of you will be surprised.

This is a moment of pop star authenticity, of sort of diaristic pop stardom, bedroom pop stardom.

We just had a massive album from Taylor Swift that is this is like kind of insular drilling down on her inner

world in life and again I don't think I need to repeat all the examples of how this works this is

an idiosyncratic sort of diaristic era for pop stardom generally speaking and even if you're

Beyonce you're still creating music that requires a lot of like thought and like you know is

very detail orientedoriented, whether

it be about her personal life or like whatever essay she's writing in her records.

Dulepa is very consciously, it seems like, to me, harkening back to an era of pop stardom that was

all facade, glitz glam, big broad radio hits, like you don't really know much about her. And the campaign for this album, she's made it very explicit that that is intentional. Like, she doesn't want to share that much about herself. And again, this is a mode of pop start. I think the three of us will be familiar with as people that grew up in the millennial generation. And I think would be familiar to people that came before us. Like a very common era of kind of like show busy glitz and glam surface era entertainers driven pop music

and stardom. But she's kind of counter programming, or I think that was part of future

nostalgia's appeal at the time, is like she was sort of counter programming to the Taylor Swiftian

Olivia Rodriguez vision of pop stardom. She was a different thing.

But I also think that puts some interesting demands on her because she's really operating

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