If you wanted to take Lorde’s third album, Solar Power, as a farewell to chasing mainstream stardom, closer Oceanic Feeling was strong evidence: her trademark “cherry black lipstick” was “gathering dust in a drawer / I don’t need her any more.” Instead, she offered a beautiful, sun-kissed paean to stepping off the treadmill: “I just had to breathe,” she explains.
Between her first and second albums, Lorde performed with the surviving members of Nirvana, and essayed an astonishing Brit awards tribute to David Bowie. She also absolutely crushed her contribution to the Hunger Games: Mockingjay soundtrack – Yellow Flicker Beat is ominous and powerful, and it works both as part of the movie’s plot and entirely separate from it.
Amid Solar Power’s seemingly earnest paeans to taking it easy came Mood Ring, a song that suggested Lorde’s capacity for snark wasn’t diminished. Just as she did with pop culture on Royals, she fixes her satirical gaze on millennial wellness trends, with splendid results: “Let’s fly somewhere eastern! They’ll have what I need!”
If you want evidence of the cool, this-is-me self-confidence that powered Lorde’s debut album, you could do worse than listen to Buzzcut Season. Its memories of past summers are set to music eerily sparse by the standards of 2013, an era of DayGlo pop maximalism, EDM, Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball and Katy Perry’s Roar.
A grumbling electric guitar plays a folky figure (vaguely evocative of Nico’s celebrated These Days), backing a plethora of worries about the passage of time: youthful beauty fading, relationships withering, tastes in music changing. An existential crisis or just a mind wandering under the influence of THC? Lorde isn’t sure, but it sounds beautiful either way.
Lorde’s breakthrough hit wasn’t the best track on Pure Heroine, but it might be the most striking: the sound of pop’s target market answering back, with an incisive skewering of the glaring disparity between the unattainable lifestyles it projects and the realities of teenage life – and beating it at its own game.
Her second album, Melodrama, depicted the debauchery and emotional chaos of late teen lives so brilliantly, the fact the late teen in question was a huge pop star seemed beside the point. The Louvre reports from the dizzy height of an inadvisable romance: “We’re the greatest, they’ll hang us in the Louvre / Down the back but who cares – still the Louvre.”
The sparkling big-chorused pop of Perfect Places sounds buoyant, but it jars against the lyrics. They paint a picture of Lorde partying – she drinks, drugs, cops off and throws up – and ending up not in hedonistic nirvana but in hollow, hungover regret, wondering “what the fuck” the point is.
The key line on Pure Heroine might be Team’s snotty riposte to pop’s then-current obsession with partying in the VIP area: “I’m kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air,” it snaps, fabulously. The sound of a kid who has heard one Black Eyed Peas hit too many.
A limpid melody and a raw, close-miked vocal, as if someone who has had a few drinks is detailing their romantic woes inches away from your face, replete with I’ll-never-love-again misery and a resolution, of sorts: “You’re all gonna watch me disappear into the sun.” Intense, but beautiful with it.
A strikingly effective update of Melodrama’s angst-ridden-yet-euphoric banger approach, Lorde’s brand new single comes complete with a lyric that compares sexual desire to smoking a cigarette on MDMA. Charli xcx recently announced the coming of a “Lorde summer”: if the rest of the next album is as good as this, she might have a point.
Packing one of the most fabulously surly (and very teenage) opening lines in pop history – “Don’t you think it’s boring how people talk?” – Lorde stares down the prospect of fame with an equivocal eye. The irony is that the song itself is so perfectly constructed it makes huge success seem inevitable.
It’s one of the few songs on Melodrama to reference Lorde’s fame, albeit obliquely (“continents and cars … the stages and the stars”). But Supercut’s real currency is more breakup-fuelled distress, this time set to music that slowly builds to a delicious, dizzyingly effective pop chorus, then collapses into racked silence before gradually rebuilding itself again.
If Melodrama seemed more straightforwardly poppy than its predecessor, Lorde’s oddball side took charge here. This is two entirely different tracks jammed into one: the first stately, punctuated by screams and scraping noise, the second a kind of creeped-out nursery rhyme that borrows the drums from Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight.
A beautiful, complex portrayal of the friendship between two adolescent weirdos. Brutal self-assessment coexists with take-us-or-leave-us swagger – “Maybe the internet raised us, or maybe people are jerks” is a particularly great line – perfectly mirrored in the song’s musical shifts from fragile solo electric guitar to dancefloor-engaging four-four thud.
A masterclass in how to make a fantastic 21st-century pop track, everything about Homemade Dynamite is inspired: the spiky staccato arrangement at odds with Lorde’s cooing vocal, the vaguely military beat, the earworm chorus, the stammering hook. Also fantastic:the all-star remix featuring SZA, Post Malone and Khalid.
This is Melodrama’s killer breakup ballad, at turns despondent, stoic and savage, its sudden shifts in mood utterly believable. The orchestration is subtly done – all the drama comes from Lorde’s lyrics and voice, which starts as a bitter snarl, gradually gathers itself and transforms, stunningly, into swooping, Kate Bush-esque catharsis as it reaches the chorus.
The perfect example of Pure Heroine’s ability to transform the mundane into something gripping. It’s a song about “killing time” by driving aimlessly around with a pal, but the vocals are surrounded by occasionally off-key synths: a strange, faintly uneasy counterpoint to the lyrics about friendship and suburban contentment.
A thrillingly explosive introduction to Lorde’s second album. Fuelled by extraordinarily bitter sentiments – at one point, she wishes her ex could be mauled by a shark – and hands-in-the-air house piano, Green Light abandons Pure Heroine’s slow-burn sound in favour of careering along, dragging us with it.
Ribs sharply evokes both a house party’s hungover aftermath and the weird, liminal nature of adolescence, the disquieting moment when you’re struck by the realisation that your childhood is over and you’re entirely unprepared for whatever is supposed to happen next, no matter how much you pretend you are: “We can talk it so good … it drives you crazy getting old.” Perfectly, the music is all about anticipation: one long build to a climax that never arrives. The startling brilliance of Lorde’s debut album – a teenage audience’s concerns addressed directly by another teenager, albeit a preternaturally smart one – is encapsulated in four minutes.