“Levitating” by Dua Lipa

"Levitating" floats out of Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa's second album, from 2020, and it began with a single sound: a sample of a Roland VP-330 synthesizer that Stephen Kozmeniuk, known as Koz, played. Lipa wrote it with Koz, Clarence Coffee Jr. and Sarah Hudson, and Koz produced it with Stuart Price, handling drums, guitar, synths and bass himself while Bosko adds talkbox. The result is electro-disco with its roots proudly on show, splicing dance-pop, pop-funk and a little space rock into a love song that treats falling for someone like zero gravity, shot through with outer-space imagery.

It turned into a slow-motion juggernaut: only No. 2 on the Hot 100, yet the top song of Billboard's 2021 year-end chart, with 41 weeks in the Top 10 and 77 on the chart, and Billboard later named it the biggest song by a female lead this century.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.