It was fall 2019 and Dua Lipa, the London-based pop singer, was having a rare moment of self-doubt. She had just scrubbed her Instagram clean, 21st-century pop-star code for symbolic rebirth, and was readying to release “Don’t Start Now,” the first single from her second record, Future Nostalgia. The follow-up to her well-received if not earth-shifting self-titled debut, this was meant to serve as an artistic coming of age: an exuberant statement aimed at pop charts that had been dominated by ballads and downcast hip-hop for a few years. The hardest work was done, and Lipa loved the song—a thumping, bittersweet dance floor anthem full of high-disco rattles and flourishes that had confidence to spare. Yet that October, she couldn’t shake a certain anxiety, one familiar to anyone who’s ever released a creative endeavor online.

“I was like, Oh, it’s very different to what people have heard from me,” Lipa said on a Zoom call from her London apartment in April. She sat on a couch under a playful wall sculpture, dressed in the immaculate loungewear she favored even before the pandemic. Between pauses to rein in her one-year-old rescue puppy, Dexter, she recalled that on the run-up to the song’s Halloween debut, her apprehension only grew. She tried meditation. She tried hypnotherapy.

“I think I just needed something to just calm my brain down and help me kind of get rid of any anxiety,” she said, “and almost be able to tell myself that everything that I’ve learned I could do in my sleep.”

Talking about all of this uncertainty in mid-2021 is of course a little absurd. “Don’t Start Now” would eventually go on to reach number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and amass nearly 1.5 billion combined streams on Spotify and YouTube as of this writing. Future Nostalgia, a dance record begging to be heard in the common space of the club, would nonetheless thrive amid quarantine to score a Grammy for best pop vocal album and unleash an extraordinary run of Top 40 singles. Along the way, Lipa became one of the first major pop stars to attempt an all-out promotional rollout from home. She appeared on late-night shows after doing her own hair and makeup, tearfully discussed her sadness about the moment on Instagram Live, and adapted to working via video call like the rest of us. The whole undertaking would turn Lipa from ambitious upstart to bona fide superstar.

That she had a pre-pandemic lesson in uncertainty might have helped her chart the course. Her longtime manager, Ben Mawson, told me that at first the team hesitated about going forward through the global shutdown, as many other artists chose to last year, but ultimately saw it as a unique opportunity. “She’d been waiting for this moment,” he said. “It was music that was uplifting and happy, and so we thought maybe the world needs this.”

To American listeners, Lipa’s success may seem to have come from nowhere. But her story is one of continent-crossing perseverance, a bit of luck, and one of those generational pop personalities who simply will not be denied. Future Nostalgia would have been an unusual record even if it hadn’t arrived at the beginning of a global crisis. It takes a buffet-table approach to the sonic decorations from decades’ worth of disco, funk, and synth pop while also showcasing Lipa’s keen ear for complex vocal melodies and her distinctively raspy and lithe voice. It marries the efficiency of structured pop with the curiosity of dance music, yet in between pulsing bass lines and naturalistic percussion, it’s full of silence: little spaces here and there that telegraph a breath before a song blooms into something new. Its emotional and dynamic range is broad, yet it all passes by effortlessly.

The record’s title came to Lipa before anything else. She almost used “future nostalgia” as a backdrop for a 2018 awards-show performance before deciding that she wanted to save it for something special. “I loved jumping into what felt like a story,” she said. “I’ve really loved the idea of Future Nostalgia having its own world.” Though Lipa worked with a long list of collaborators on the album, a core group of contributors from her 2017 debut, including songwriter Clarence Coffee Jr. and producer-writer Stephen “Koz” Kozmeniuk, returned to the studio with her for the Future Nostalgia sessions in summer 2018. Both said that the experience of working with Lipa is marked primarily by how fun it is. (“I have summer-camp vibes with one of my best friends,” Coffee told me.)

Koz was one of the first people she told about the title, and he said it was helpful in nailing a sonic palette. Lipa was struggling to express exactly how it would translate into music until a session where she, Coffee, Koz, and songwriter Sarah Hudson wrote “Levitating,” which would eventually become the album’s sixth single and a major hit. The bones of the song are audible on the first voice memo they recorded, and with the help of doughnuts and plenty of playing around, it came together in about a day. “The difference with Dua’s project, compared to a lot of other projects, it feels like you’re in a little band,” Koz said of the song. “I can still hear what the day was, I can hear the laughs, I can hear the jokes. It was a riot.”

Hudson and Coffee eventually gave Lipa a nameplate necklace that reads “Sugaboo,” the group’s studio term of endearment that made its way into the song’s chorus. Their bond, Lipa said, makes constructive criticism much easier. In that way, it’s also a strategy for keeping out doubt.

“There was just this pressure,” Lipa said. “People just telling me that I wasn’t good enough or that I wasn’t deserving of it or whatever it was…. I was like, ‘All right, I’m just going to shut everything out. And I’m going to make sure that I get this album the way that I want it to. And I’m really just going to focus on being great at everything that I do.’ ”

Lipa was born in London in 1995, about three years after her parents, Dukagjin and Anesa, emigrated from Pristina, a midsize city in Kosovo, then still part of Yugoslavia. Though the war that would make Kosovo a matter of global concern wouldn’t begin until 1998, Pristina in 1995 was already a difficult place to live for its ethnic Albanian majority. Dua’s grandfather, Seit Lipa, was head of the Institute for the History of Kosovo when it was targeted for closure by Serbian law in 1992, a move that a special rapporteur for the United Nations later called a sign of burgeoning human rights violations.

In London, where the family joined a growing exodus from Kosovo, Lipa’s parents spoke Albanian and raised her with an awareness of their culture. Dukagjin is a musician, and Lipa remembers a house full of music. In December, Anesa told CBS Sunday Morning that her daughter seemed destined to be a performer early on, and when I asked Lipa about it, she said, “Probably the amount of times I annoyingly interrupted her dinners at home with friends and was like, I’m going to put on a show now.”

“Everything was Albanian at home, and English was my school life,” Lipa said. “I had so much family in Kosovo, but also because of the situation and not being able to go back, I had never really met my family.” Because she was young during the open conflict that lasted until the summer of 1999, Lipa didn’t know much about it. “I guess my parents also didn’t want to upset me at such a young age,” she said. “After the war, my dad’s father passed away and my dad couldn’t make it back in time, because obviously all the borders were closed, but it was just one of those things they didn’t tell me until a little bit later on.”

Still, Lipa always had a sense that she had another place to return to and was excited when the family, which by then included her younger siblings, Rina and Gjin, moved back when she was 11. “I was returning to a place where I almost already felt I belonged,” she said. “It was really exciting for me to get to go to a place where also I felt, in some way, I would be more normal.”

In Pristina, she became an amateur anthropologist of a culture she was already a part of. It started with the larger things, like realizing that her Albanian wasn’t yet up to snuff for academic work and struggling through a few years of bad grades. She also started to learn, via her friends, more about the region’s conflict. “These stories, they stay with you forever,” she said. “The people that they’d lost during the war, and the amount of friends I had that had lost their fathers or their uncles or brothers, or how people were violently taken away from their homes.”

She made friends and watched the way teenagers in the city coalesced in Mother Teresa Square. In the mid-aughts, a few prominent businessmen realized that bringing international artists to the country could help reassure the world that Kosovo was safe. Because hip-hop was easily the most popular genre there, 50 Cent became the first major star to perform in Pristina’s stadium in 2007. That show’s success led to more, and Lipa saw a pretty impressive list of American rappers such as Method Man and Redman and Snoop Dogg in concert before the age of 15. It was an early exposure to what it means when music functions as a universal language.

Lipa credits her time in Pristina with instilling her with political convictions. Though her music isn’t explicit on the topic and her persona as a pop star is slick and playful, she’s always been willing to take a side, even when it could spark controversy. Those who watch her closely will have noticed her full-throated support for Black Lives Matter, her enthusiasm for voting Labour in 2019, and her persistence in celebrating her Albanian identity despite occasional negative reactions to the symbology she’s used to express it.

“It mainly came because of my roots in Kosovo, and wanting to take a stand on that and talk about that and the refugee situation. And then slowly starting to understand how, you know, the politics of war, how that all happens, why so many children are displaced,” she said. “Things stemmed from a personal experience into then wanting to learn more and trying to also be a voice for lots of other people.”

It’s also a matter of using the platform she regards as a privilege: “As my profile is growing, especially online, I feel like I need to use that to do something better than, you know, posting cute pictures or whatever.”

In the weeks after our interview, Lipa continued to voice support for Palestinians suffering in Gaza and in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah as conflict erupted in both areas. In late May, a pro-Israel group called the World Values Network attacked Lipa—along with models (and sisters of her boyfriend, Anwar) Bella and Gigi Hadid, who are of Palestinian descent—in a rambling full-page New York Times ad that attempted to conflate Lipa’s stance with anti-Semitism. In a social media response, Lipa reiterated her principles of solidarity and justice. There was no question that she would remain committed to using that platform to speak on the issue.

Lipa’s political engagement—especially on the cause of universal health care—has led her to a friendship with U.S. senator Bernie Sanders. She campaigned for Sanders during his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, hosted video chats with him during the run-up to the general election, and he presented her with an award at the Billboard ceremony in December. Sanders took great umbrage with the ads.

“The attacks against Dua are outrageous,” Sanders said. “Simply saying that we must uphold international standards of human rights consistently, even when it’s politically difficult, is not anti-Semitism. The time is now to adopt an even-handed approach in the conflict, one that says Israel has the absolute right to live in peace and security, but so do the Palestinians. It is good that we are seeing the rise of a new generation of leaders, like Dua, who are speaking out in support of building a society based on human needs and political equality.”

Lipa was 12 and watching on TV in the family flat when Kosovo declared independence in February 2008. “I remember seeing the joy of my parents and my family and everybody, hearing the whole city roaring when Independence Day happened,” she said. But still, she felt a pull back to London. A few years later, she came up with a plan to return to the U.K. by herself. Her motivations were complex, but at their core, she thought it gave her the best chance of making it as a musician. Despite a decade of progress, Kosovo was still isolated and underdeveloped, and social media hadn’t yet transformed talent discovery. Lipa said she had to convince her parents with “a little conversation at a time,” but they eventually agreed when they realized she could move into an apartment with a family friend who was studying at the London School of Economics.

At 15, she left Pristina alone. She said that maybe she would have made a different choice if streaming had been the alternative route to mainstream success it is now, but it’s clear she was happy to return to England. Talking to her, one gets the distinct sense of dual Duas: If being an Albanian Kosovar is her ethnic identity, being British is her personality. It comes across in the small things—her enthusiasm for the NHS, her commitment to waiting her turn for the coronavirus vaccine, and her support for other young British artists, like Arlo Parks, whose song “Eugene” she sang on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge in April—and in the bigger ones, like her sheer love for the city of London. “I feel like my life will always be between two places,” she said.

Her solo move to London has become part of her lore because it was gutsy—and it’s made all the more impressive by the fact that it worked out almost exactly as she planned. She gave herself one year after finishing secondary school to find representation before considering another career path. Lipa was waiting tables in Soho and using her YouTube channel of cover songs as a portfolio when a friend helped her get a meeting with Mawson, a former entertainment lawyer who pivoted to management when he began working with Lana Del Rey. “She came into the room and she didn’t have much to play in the way of music, but it was her personality that drew me to her,” Mawson said. “She didn’t quite know what she wanted in granular terms, but the big picture was very clear—and the ambition.” He’s been her manager ever since.

Lipa started piecing together an album over years of sessions yielding about 160 songs with a wide array of songwriters. “I was just putting songs out in the hopes that they would just have a little bit more momentum than the last song,” she said. “Baby steps. Just a little bit more than the other ones. Just a couple more people. Sell out one more show, or have the rooms fill up just a little bit more.”

At 18, Lipa was usually the youngest person in the room. Kozmeniuk, who cowrote or produced four tracks on Future Nostalgia, first met her when she went to Toronto in October 2014. Koz recalled being impressed by her “cool, loving” personality, her voice—and her slight air of mystery. “It was just something so compelling right off the bat,” he said. “Other situations can be toxic, especially in the music business, so when you find little situations where it can be honest, where there’s freedom, people don’t get bent out of shape, it’s nice.”

Those early sessions were a proving ground for Lipa, who was well aware of the pitfalls and boxes that await young women breaking into the industry. “I was constantly being like, ‘This is me and I’m not manufactured,’ ” she said. “But it takes a lot of growth and time and effort and all of that until you get to a point where people say, ‘Okay, I believe you.’ ”

In the run-up to the release of her album in June 2017, she gained early traction with a mostly European audience as part of a wave of young female Brits who mixed EDM influences with bubbly pop songwriting. It wasn’t until a month after its release—when a female-empowerment slumber party video for “New Rules,” the album’s seventh single, went viral and brought the song to an American audience—that she really distinguished herself as an artist with a vision.

By the end of 2017, she had become Spotify’s most streamed female artist in the U.K., and by early 2018, the song had hit the Hot 100, peaking at number six. Global impact was part of the plan from the beginning, said Mawson. “There are a lot of British artists who count successes in the U.K., but we’re very much focused on the world, so we have that in mind when we work on music,” he added. “If we don’t have an American radio team totally confident, it’s not going to be a single.”

The momentum allowed Lipa to go into the studio for her second album with a new degree of freedom. (“Now I’m really allowed to do whatever the fuck I want,” she told GQ in January 2018.) But it also brought scrutiny. Over the course of 2018, a few backhanded YouTube comments and awkward performance clips became memes that had unusual staying power, even if their implication was a bit inscrutable.

One of the most lasting ones—“go girl give us nothing,” on a video of her at the 2018 Brit Awards—could be read as praise for her enrapturing nonchalance onstage, which really is different from the sillier person you might see on Instagram. But to Lipa, it also reflected what she saw as her own shortcomings in the period as her popularity ramped up and her schedule was stuffed.

“It’s one thing when people are mean about you, but you know that you did your best,” she said. “But it’s another thing when people are mean about you and you know that you actually haven’t had the opportunity to be the best because you’ve spread yourself so thinly in trying to do everything at once.” Though Lipa did take the criticism personally—she mentioned the “nothing” comment specifically—her takeaway is telling.

“You want to show that you’re here to stay and you want to show that it’s not just about one album or one big song or whatever it is,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure that this time around, I was very much in control of the fact that I’m going to do the music, then I’m going to rehearse. And then when I come in and I do the performances, they’re all going to be amazing. I’m going to prove to people that I can do this and that I’m here to stay.”

In March 2020 Lipa was on her way back to London from promoting the album in Australia. She was looking forward to spending a few weeks at home with Anwar Hadid, whom she began seeing in June 2019. Her return, it turns out, was a harbinger of the year to come: “I opened the front door to my house and all of a sudden, I can hear this water trickling…. And my whole apartment, it had flooded!” A pipe had burst above her apartment.

So when she performed “Don’t Start Now” on March 30 on James Corden’s late-night show, she was doing it from a precarious setup in an Airbnb. The Zoom call-esque production, which featured Lipa accompanied by her band and dancers in separate video squares, was a hit in those early quarantine days when late-night TV, and the rest of the world, was still on its heels.

“It was a really small, little studio flat,” she said. “I was balancing my iPhone on my laptop, using the little oven lights from behind to give me some ambience.” By the time she appeared on the Tonight Show a little over a week later, she was more confident and began to experiment with the form. The resulting performance played up the novelty of it all with a filter and green-screen effect.

With the help of her team, she kept coming up with more work-arounds. It seemed to distract her from the dislocation she felt being away from home and the stress of moving three more times during the U.K.’s first lockdown. Otherwise, it was a peaceful escape for the couple, where they indulged in a love of the card game Uno, did some painting, and enjoyed the unseasonably pleasant English springtime. “We got lucky,” she said. “Lots of being out in the garden, reading a book, and just chilling and listening to music.”

Even before the pandemic, Lipa and Hadid had never spent more than two weeks apart, unusual for a bicontinental relationship. On their respective Instagrams, Lipa and Hadid share a preternatural sense of cool and a few quirks from their upbringings. “Anwar is half Dutch, so he’s also quite European in some senses,” she said. In keeping with her general policy for posting on social media, she asks Hadid before sharing any photos of him, though she isn’t necessarily upset if he doesn’t do the same. “I always like to ask if he likes a picture before I post it. But I also think sometimes it’s sweet that he really likes kind of ugly pictures of me,” she said. “And I look at him, I’m like, ‘Really?’ And he’s like, ‘I love it.’ And then I let him post it, although I hate it.”

When the lockdown lifted in July, Lipa and Hadid returned to the U.S. after a brief quarantine in the Caribbean, and she got back to in-person work with strict precautions. First came Club Future Nostalgia, a remix album helmed by Marea Stamper, who DJs as the Blessed Madonna, which gave her an opportunity to extend the life of the record a bit, learn more about the technical aspects of remixing, and work with a few dream collaborators, like Madonna and Gwen Stefani.

Lipa’s sense of what will work on the dance floor—and her ability to translate that around the world—is reminiscent of Kylie Minogue, the Australian artist whose long career has made her the doyenne of dance-forward pop songs. So it’s only natural that Minogue took an interest in Lipa once she encountered her music. Eventually the two met and were able to collaborate in a distinctly 21st-century way, in a busy frenzy of remixes and Minogue’s guest appearance on Studio 2054, a livestream concert that attracted 5 million viewers in November.

“I think it works with how so many people hear music now,” Minogue told Vanity Fair of the circumstances that led her to work with Lipa. “She’s delivering quality all the way and I totally appreciate that even though she is making it look easy, it takes a lot of hard work and devotion.”

As Mawson pointed out, Lipa and her team were lucky to release the album at a time when other pop stars had decided to wait things out. Still, something about Future Nostalgia seems tailor-made for a moment when traditional sources of fun have shut down but you still need joy as a lifeline. Lipa lights up when she reminisces about the impromptu gatherings she’s seen coalesce around her: those teenage hangs in Mother Teresa Square, watching the 2014 World Cup broadcast in London. Before the pandemic, she would throw dinner parties and turn her apartment into a dance floor. “My flat is quite small. So it’s always quite fun when you just fill it up,” she said with a laugh. “It just gets fun and sweaty.” It might be why she was a perfect ambassador to a new way to party—“Club Living Room,” as her songwriting partner Coffee put it.

Over the course of the spring—in between writing and recording songs for another album, which Lipa has already given a title, currently known by only a few collaborators—she left the flat behind for a while and went on a victory lap befitting a global star, with blockbuster performances at the Grammys and the Brit Awards, and a performance at Elton John’s Oscar livestream that included two different high-collared Balenciaga gowns.

For an artist, something on the level of Future Nostalgia could represent the pinnacle of a pop career. It brought Lipa the respect she had been hoping for while giving her plenty of opportunities to have fun despite the difficulties of 2020. Now she’s in uncharted waters, and it’s up to her to find a place in pop’s pantheon.

On Oscar night, she stunned one of its longtime members. “She turned up so well prepared—and was a joy to sing with,” John told Vanity Fair. “Her musical chops are substantial. She has so much presence—an elegant poise and sophistication that belies her youth.”

“Dua,” John said, “can go wherever she wants!”

So while her ongoing project of world domination is still unfolding, her aims for the near term are slightly more concrete: two more albums and tours over the next few years. Lipa brought up acting or wine making as things she might one day try but emphasized that the music remains her focus. “I want to solidify myself as an artist in that aspect first, before anything else,” she said. “For now, I just wanna make sure the music is good.”

HAIR, LUKE HERSHESON; MAKEUP, LISA ELDRIDGE; MANICURE, MICHELLE HUMPHREY; TAILOR, ALICE RATCLIFFE; SET DESIGN, SEAN THOMSON. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY ROSCO PRODUCTION. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

— A Messy Vaccinated Wedding Season Has Arrived
— How Harry and Meghan Decided On the Name Lilibet Diana
— Black Joy Comes to Shakespeare in the Park
— Even More Kanye West and Irina Shayk Details Emerge
— The Bennifer Story Really Does Have Everything
— Ahead of the Diana Tribute, Harry and William Are Still Working On Their Relationship
— Tommy Dorfman on Rewriting Queer Narratives and the Smell of Good Sweat
— From the Archive: A Spin on the Top DJs in the World
— Sign up for the “Royal Watch” newsletter to receive all the chatter from Kensington Palace and beyond.