Dua Lipa is just 20 years old, but her smoky, velvety voice sounds like a woman experienced in life with many ups and downs. That's not surprising: the Albanian-born Brit began pushing her musical career forward at the age of 15, focused entirely on herself.
A career that's currently picking up mighty steam: Her second single, "Be The One," released last December, became a perennial international radio hit and catapulted her from a standing start into the top ten charts in many nations, narrowly missing out in Germany with an 11th place finish. In the wake of this hit, she was voted onto the globally renowned "BBC Sound of 2016" list, which defines the most promising newcomers every year - and usually gets it right. Dua Lipa's debut album is expected this summer. From October 19 to 25, the young singer with her exciting mix of modern pop and soul as well as influences from her Albanian homeland will come to Germany for five concerts in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich.
London-born Dua Lipa was influenced at an early age by artists such as Destiny's Child, Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. and later attended the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School in London's West End. When the family moved back to Kosovo, Dua didn't last long there and was soon back in London. Initially she worked in clubs and as a model to finance her further education. In the process, she also developed a flair for her very own look, somewhere between dreamy hippie and tough rock brat, which has already earned her a reputation as London's next "it girl."
Dua Lipa, who was just 16 at the time, began her musical career by uploading cover versions of R'n'B songs to various online portals. The recordings caused a huge stir among music fans of all ages and all over the world - and one day also with the management of successful colleague Lana Del Rey. A first record deal was soon negotiated, and so the first single "New Love" was released in the summer of 2015, making her widely known in the UK. Global success came with the next release, the song "Be The One", released in the winter of 2015, which has already made it to more than six million views on the video portal YouTube and climbed high in the charts in countless nations.
Meanwhile, the singer is working with quite a few well-known producers on the songs for her debut album, on which she formulates a cultural mixture of her imprints: On the one hand the postmodern aesthetics of modern R'n'B productions, on the other hand harmonic structures that remind of the Balkan way of life. She receives help from Emile Haynie (Lana Del Rey, FKA Twigs) and Andrew Wyatt (Miike Snow, Charli XCX), among others. Adventure as such became her biggest inspiration - her music is pure, open and passionate. She sounds like a girl who grew up in London, discovering the world and then packaging and expressing what she experienced on her own terms. Given that she's also been included by the BBC in the "Sound of 2016" list, in which the British broadcaster predicts the most successful artists of the following year with a dreamlike hit rate, one thing is quite certain: 2016 will be Dua Lipa's year.
Text source and more information about this event:
http://www.gibson-club.de/dua-lipa/
