The Blessed Madonna + Dua Lipa Present 'Club Future Nostalgia'

Today, Dua Lipa, The Blessed Madonna, and their various cast of collaborators present Club Future Nostalgia. The album kickoff began with "Levitating" ft. Missy Elliott and Madonna, with an accompanying music video. Marea Stamper, aka The Blessed Madonna, is a Kentucky-born, Chicago-adopted, and now London-based DJ and producer who has become one of the most celebrated names in global club culture. You can now hear the album HERE.

An eclectic and euphoric mix of the past and present, Club Future Nostalgia celebrates musical worlds coming together, with '90s house blending seamlessly with 2020's finest pop and remixers, a splash of '80s soul, and a few noughties musical gems added to the blend.

For The Blessed Madonna, working with Dua was a dream come true, in the realm of super-producers who teamed up with pop stars back in the '90s, like William Orbit working with Madonna. "I love pop music," Marea enthuses. "My favourite dance records are pop records. I see Dua in this long line of women who have been the propelling force of this incredible sound that is changed in every generation, but contains things going all the way back to the Supremes." Working from her London home during the coronavirus lockdown, Marea's first step on the project was to spend eight hours a day in her attic, pulling apart Future Nostalgia and getting under its mirrorball surface. "I already liked the album. But hearing all the vocals isolated, and learning every lyric, and seeing how much thought and depth was there - I went from being a fan to a super fan."

t will also be her first project under her new name, which she changed recently in light of Black Lives Matter protests globally. "There's no way that in the gravity of this moment, that the words we're using are not going to be pulled through the prism of race," she reflects. "It was a symbolic thing to let go of, to remove the confusion around it, and acknowledge that people struggled with it. There's no white person that lives in this world which is so, so absolutely, and completely tilted in our favor that doesn't have something that they need to change. And there's no time like the present."

When she got to work on the record, Marea wanted to add a layer of her own personal nostalgia to Dua's, infusing it with elements of Barbara Mason and Neneh Cherry records she loves, as well as referencing "the lightness and heaviness" of hip-hop records that are both humorous and powerful, like Paul's Boutique and De La Soul Is Dead. "I wanted it to be more than a mix," she says, noting all the airhorns, DJ scratches and radio links that are intricately woven into the fabric of her continuous 50-minute Club Future Nostalgia set. Samples in the mix come from everyone from Robert Owens, to Stevie Nicks, to Gwen Stefani, joining the musical dots between remixes from legends like Larry Heard and newcomers like Yaeji. "The thing that I'm proudest of is that literally every remix on this record, I would play in the most underground, dirty, dankest location."

One of the first decisions that was made was that Marea would remix the bouncy, handclap-filled "Levitating" - with the iconic Madonna on board already, Marea decided to shoot her shot and ask if they could get the "demigod" Missy Elliott too. When Missy agreed, and sent her verse as a voice note, the sci-fi disco was elevated to new heights. The icing on the cake was having Mike Dean mix the record. "He's a person I've thought of four billion times in the studio," says Marea. "There's so many times I've looked at a section of a record and gone, 'I need to Mike Dean the s out of this'. So to get something from Mike, that he himself Mike Deaned the s out of - it's mind-boggling."

Another guest star appearance comes from Gwen Stefani on "Physical". With pop mogul Mark Ronson turning the disco workout into a downbeat, sultry synth jam, Gwen shows up to join Dua on the powerhouse vocals. "That was incredible," Marea says, "the way Mark went the opposite way you would expect - it's so slinky. It feels like riding in a really nice car at night."

Watch the "Levitating" music video here:

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