![]() Making fans wait so long for Solar Power was far more divisive than anyone would’ve expected. She used the privilege of stardom to go four years between albums. Few 21-year-olds have this much perspective on their breakups. (Remixes of “Perfect Places” and “Supercut” dabbled in R&B and hip-hop, respectively.) But the album’s ambition and variety take the potential of Pure Heroine even further. EDM producer Flume’s first-rate remix of “Tennis Court” might have suggested Lorde’s potential as a dance music artist. Musically, Melodrama heads in several new directions. The second half revises earlier songs from a different perspective: “Sober II (Melodrama)” and “Liability (Reprise)” leans into the comedown of heartbreak. “Liability” is written from the perspective of the main character’s male partner. “Sober” segues from “Green Light” into the rush of first love while wondering how long it’ll last. A celebration of moving on, it mixes disenchantment with contagious euphoria and set the stage for Melodrama. Inspired by house music, “Green Light,” the opening track, has soaring major piano chords and a startling key change on the chorus. She then returned with Melodrama, in which the drunken excitement and eventual fallout of a party serves as a conceptual hook for the complicated rise and fall of a relationship. Few albums suggest this much work went into selecting and mixing programmed drum sounds.įollowing Pure Heroine, she selected artists and songs for the soundtrack to The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1, which includes three of her songs: “Yellow Flicker Beat,” a Kanye West remix of it and a cover of Conor Oberst’s “Ladder Song.” ![]() (She influenced a lot more glib, downtempo pop music about depression than she actually made.) While the album’s production is more elaborate than “Royals,” it’s still a fairly minimal procession of distorted synth chords, assertive percussion snaps and Lorde harmonizing with herself. Throughout the album, she’s searching for an answer to her alienation, even if all she can do is sing about it. In retrospect, one wonders how much she was playing a character, but her lyrics never succumb to facile smugness. “I’m kinda over getting told to throw my hands in the air” (“Team”) was a dig at the relentless cheer of Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop.” Despite her major label push, Lorde cast herself as an underdog, celebrating her devotion to her friends and looking forward to her first airplane ride. With “Royals” as the template, her persona on Pure Heroine combines antsiness - “Tennis Court” starts the album off with “don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk? / Making small talk with their words again / Well, I’m bored” - with the cynicism of a smart teen. Producer Joel Little was still working out the right balance between Lorde’s vocals and the drums. “Biting Down,” which threatens to push into more abrasive territory, is also a keeper, but Pure Heroine upped the ante much further. version (The entire EP is now available only as bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of Pure Heroine.) While it shows promise, there’s a reason “Royals” was the standout. Universal reissued it six months later, appending a cover of the Replacements’ “Swingin’ Party” to the U.S. #LORDE PURE HEROINE DELUXE EDITION DOWNLOAD FREE#“Royals” was played in almost every radio format.Īlthough the teen born Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor already had a major label deal, she dropped The Love Club EP directly to SoundCloud as a free download. Combining a tradition of simple rock songs about teenage rebellion with the Neptunes’ radically stripped-down hip-hop production, it flirts with both genres without falling neatly into either. The song’s success played a large role in changing that landscape in the second half of the 2010s. Although “Royals” was criticized for drawing its images of materialistic flexing from hip-hop videos (“Grey Goose, gold teeth, tigers in the bathroom”) without acknowledging the poverty many rappers come from, its target was a larger landscape of pop music depicting life as an endless party with no room for more difficult emotions. Booming drums drown out distant synth chords, with Lorde’s multi-tracked vocals supplying the only melody. Neither does the distinction between “mainstream” and “indie” (that’s a stylistic valuation rather than a corporate one: all three artists are signed to branches of Universal Music Group.) “Royals,” her breakthrough single, recorded when the New Zealander was 15, sounded like nothing else on Top 40 radio in 2012. ![]() ![]() Like Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish, Lorde’s music exists in a space where genre divisions don’t much matter. ![]()
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