Dua Upa’s brow is furrowed, as if she is trying to crack a particularly knotty trigonometry problem. On a cloudy May afternoon, she stands behind a stately vintage mixing desk in Manhattan’s exclusive Jungle City Studios with folded arms and a wide stance as $40,000 speakers blast out her effervescent, currently unfinished, theme song for Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s DayGlo study of life in plastic. “I can take the heat / baby best believe, that’s the moment I shine,” she sings, her words punctuated by handclaps. With ribbony strings and bass that sizzles, it brilliantly deploys every rule in the disco-funk playbook to hit your hedonic hotspots with a sledgehammer. As the song unfurls, I follow her gaze through a window to the studio’s spacious live room - less of a recording booth than a studio apartment - which offers panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline and houses a pillar boxred Steinway piano, lacquered like a manicure.
Jungle City was founded by Ann Mincieli, a longtime engineer for Alicia Keys, who aimed to create a recording experience that, as she put it to , felt like a “seven-star hotel”. Since opening in 2011, it has been a recording mecca for pop’s elite and an incubator for their best work; the albums worked on here include Rihanna’s , Tayior Swift’s 1989, Ariana Grande’s , and Beyoncé’s epoch-defining trio 4, and . Dua is in the studio for a few hours this afternoon and, while I wouldn’t
