“I feel like you, Joe Biden and Dua Lipa are the only people that had a good 2020,” Jimmy Kimmel joked to John Mulaney last month. Kylie Minogue agreed, tapping her dance-pop peer for a “Studio 2054” remix of “Real Groove,” the third single off her recently release album Disco.
The original song was a perfect slice of dancefloor disco-pop, blending a throbbing funk bassline with Minogue’s Europop-inspired vocal melodies. The remix speeds up the original, adds some more layered instrumentation and features Lipa layering her vocals over Minogue’s sultry coo. With her fantastic disco-pop second album Future Nostalgia – which Rolling Stone put at Number Five on our best albums of 2020 — Lipa stands as Minogue’s heir apparent. Consider the “Real Groove” remix as much torch-passing as like-minded collaboration.
Lipa’s Thanksgiving-weekend Studio 2054 livestream was a smashing success: It drew 5 million viewers — a number that Lipa’s team said was a new record for livestreams — and brought a starry guest list that included Minogue performing the original version of the track.
“Even when touring comes back, I think this’ll be part of the new model,” Ben Mawson, co-founder and co-CEO of Lipa’s management company, told Rolling Stone. “It’s a new creative form for live, and when it’s done right like I think Dua did, it works well. We’ll definitely do it again — when, we don’t know. Certainly for the rest of our artists, we’ll do more.”