Social distancing could have saved Dua Lipa from angst in the video for "Break My Heart"

Dua Lipa knows the surefire letdown is coming in her latest dance-pop track “Break My Heart.” Just ahead of her forthcoming album, the English artist dropped a colorful music video punctuated with mind-bending effects and LED-lit sets. But don’t let the bopping choreography and vintage Euro-pop beat fool you: This song is about the all-consuming anxiety that comes with new love, the fear that the potential heartbreak could be too crushing for even the most effective set of “New Rules.”

And she says it herself: Staying at home could have prevented all of this, should that disappointment come a-knockin’. (“I would’ve stayed at home/‘Cause I was doing better alone/But when you said, ‘Hello’/I knew that was the end of it all/I should’ve stayed at home/‘Cause now there ain’t no letting you go/Am I falling in love with the one that could break my heart?”) But where’s the risk in that? It’s fine, the instrumentation brings enough hope to offset Lipa’s understandable dread.

Her second album, Future Nostalgia, comes out this Friday and based on its title track, “Break My Heart,” and her previous release “Physical,” (for which she did a pretty killer remix with k-pop group Mamamoo’s Hwasa) fans are in for a lot of ‘80s-infused, hip-swiveling disco-pop. She recently talked to Apple Music about it:

“I’ve been working on it for two years, but for the first year I was still on the road and I was still trying to figure out exactly where I wanted to go with the record. I was in the studio writing and then it was really kind of the last nine months honing it in and just sessions everyday and just trying to finish it up…I’m just so happy with the response. And I actually can’t believe how much people like ‘Physical’. Not because obviously I don’t believe in the song, like I love the song and it’s my baby, but I also felt like it was a bit like Marmite because it’s so in your face. I didn’t think everybody would be into it.”