Rita Ora confirms new single will be released this month

Rita Ora has appeared to confirm that her new single will arrive later this month, having shared a clip of the track on Twitter.

The Londoner took to the platform yesterday (January 3) to share a preview of a new song, ‘You Only Love Me’. The clip features her husband, Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi, as the pair watch a fireworks display. The accompanying caption read “SURPRISE. I’M BACK! You Only Love Me XX/01/23 #RO3.”

The hashtag would seem to be in reference to Ora’s long-awaited third full-length album; her last, Phoenix, was released in 2018. In the years since, she’s featured on singles by the likes of Kygo, Sigala, David Guetta, Sam Feldt and Netsky, whilst also releasing the standalone song ‘Finish Line’ last year; the track was taken from the soundtrack to the ESPN docuseries 37 Words.

A collaborative EP, Bang, with the Kazakh DJ and producer Imanbek arrived in February of 2021, before Ora confirmed that she had signed a record deal with BMG a year later. No date has been set for the release of ‘You Only Love Me’ or for album three, but Ora’s return to focusing on her solo career comes after the Disney+ sequel series to 2017’s Beauty and the Beast, that she had been announced to star in, was delayed indefinitely.

Meanwhile, last November saw Calvin Harris scotch persistent rumours that he had produced an album for Ora that had then gone unreleased.  “Entire thing is a myth, there is one unreleased song i worked on and it isn’t good,” he said on Twitter after Ora’s interview with Louis Theroux revived social media speculation about her once-planned second album with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label, which was ultimately cancelled after she took the label to court in 2015.

Ora made headlines for the wrong reasons in 2020 when she held a 30th birthday party for friends at a west London restaurant during the UK’s second nationwide COVID-19 lockdown. She was fined £10,000, and went on to reflect on the controversy in an interview with The Independent in December 2021.  “I am incredibly embarrassed,” she said. “I still feel embarrassed. It’s really hard for me to talk about it. I just wish I had made a different choice. It makes me sad because it’s something I wish had never happened.”