Since the beginning of her professional music career in 2015, English star Dua Lipa has become one of the major rising stars in pop. What was her first song?
Dua Lipa’s first single was “New Love”, released in August 2015, which featured on her debut album “Dua Lipa”, though only on the deluxe edition. The single enjoyed limited commercial success but became popular among critics, helping Lipa receive radio airtime and raising her profile as one of the hot new acts to watch.
For more on Dua Lipa’s early career and the release of her first single, read on.
Discovery
Dua Lipa was born in London, England on August 22, 1995, to Kosovar Albanian parents. She isn’t the first musician in her family as her father, Dukagjin was a vocalist in a Kosovan rock band, Oda, in addition to his day job as a marketing manager.
In her youth, Lipa attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School in London but left when her family moved to Kosovo in 2006 due to her father being offered a job there. While in Kosovo, her family lived in the capital city, Pristina, and she attended the Mileniumi i Tretë school, which translates to Third Millennium).
Lipa discovered a love of hip hop in her teens, something that would influence her style later in her music career. She began uploading song covers to YouTube when she was 14, taking inspiration from Justin Bieber’s success in doing so.
At 15, she returned to London without her family, rejoining the Sylvia Young Theatre School every Saturday while living with a friend.
Modeling and Music
In order to pay for her music sessions, Lipa worked at nightclubs and restaurants before getting a modeling job for ASOS, an online retailer based in the UK. Lipa felt that working as a model might help her gain connections that could help advance her career in music.
She quit modeling after a manager told her she needed to lose weight in order to be a successful model.
While working as a waitress, Lipa signed with Tap Management, later rebranded as TaP Music, in 2013. Her managers at her new agency urged her to quit her day job to focus on her music, paying her a salary to do so.
While working with Tap, Lipa co-wrote the song “Hotter than Hell”, which was not her first single released but did help her get a record deal with Warner Music Group in 2015.
One of her managers at Tap, Ed Millett, has said he felt Lipa made an intelligent choice because Warner “didn’t have a big female pop artist and they needed one”. This meant she could be the group’s female focus as soon as she signed.
First Single
Dua Lipa released her first single on August 21, 2015, the day before her twentieth birthday. During the writing of her first album, entitled “Dua Lipa”, she was still struggling to find her personal voice in her lyrics.
Rather than letting this struggle negatively affect her, Lipa channeled her emotions into the lyrics of “New Love”, with the lyrics speaking about the importance of retaining your personal voice and messages as part of the huge, and at times intimidating, music industry.
“New Love” did not receive a great deal of commercial success but it met with a warm reception from music critics. The song was listed on a list of the best songs of the year, decided on by critics.
Special praise went to Lipa’s vocals and her sense of maturity at such a young age. Though the song was not the huge commercial success of some of her more recent works, it will always be her first and was included on the deluxe version of her debut studio album, “Dua Lipa”.