Three years after her slow-burning debut album, Future Nostalgia was to be the album that elevated things and broke her internationally. The first single, ‘Don’t Start Now’, was released at the end of October 2019 and lead-in single, ‘Physical’, came at the end of January 2020.

The album was brought forward a week (to 27 March) after a leak but this coincided with most major markets moving into lockdown. The team at Warner says this forced them to think on their feet given that many of the parts of a typical promotional campaign would no longer work in the new environment.

Major TV show appearances still went ahead, albeit remotely. This included a split-screen livestream performance of ‘Don’t Start Now’ on The Late, Late Show With James Corden (which got 11.1m views on Dua Lipa’s Instagram). She later performed virtually on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

She also used Zoom to call superfans and hosted a YouTube livestream on the day before album release to play snippets of tracks and give the background to their writing and recording.

The video for third single ‘Hallucinate’ had to be created in response to lockdown and used celluloid, hand-drawn animation by artist Lisha Tan. Filters for ‘Hallucinate’ designed for Instagram and Facebook were seen by over 75m people while a Snapchat lens had 110m views. TikTok was a key platform (the #Full180 hashtag, based on a lyric from ‘Don’t Start Now’, went viral and the song has been used in videos with 3.1bn cumulative views.

Club Future Nostalgia (a remix album by Dua Lipa and The Blessed Madonna featuring guests such as Madonna and Missy Elliott) followed at the end of August, in part to fill the gap left by the postponement of her world tour.

The album has spent over 20 weeks in the UK Top 10 (including four weeks at number 1) with global sales of 2m+ so far, she is the third-biggest artist in the world on Spotify, over 100m new fans added during this campaign across social channels and Future Nostalgia was nominated for the Mercury Prize.