Shut out the world and focus inwards.
Lorde’s solution? Fame, heartbreak, partying and self-analysis colour Melodrama, and, however well handled, these themes can’t avoid being well worn.
That neon is too beautiful to last, though; its buzz requires an effortful chemistry. Wickedly, the track is nigh-on impossible to dance to. And the places Lorde goes on Melodrama really are special, particularly “The Louvre.” This track, in its gleaming synths and heartswell harmonies, captures an … Melodrama ’s cover art – by New York artist Sam McKinniss – casts Lorde as a colour-dappled bohemian synaesthete.
Her party has pills, dresses rumpled on the floor, no absence of profanity, and a sense of humor, too: the moxie it takes to not only acknowledge your extravagant emotional contortions, but wink at them drolly by calling the whole thing a Melodrama. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom. But as Lorde’s voice rises in it, awed in adoration as she whispers, “Well, summer slipped us underneath her tongue/Our days and nights are perfumed with obsession,” whatever’s onscreen can’t match her luminosity. And there’s that voice of a generation thing in play again, always framing experience through a modern lens, like in ‘Supercut’, in which a relationship plays out in condensed highlights, like a YouTube clip.
Once your eardrums adapt to the galloping crescendos of tunes such as Supercut, however, the parameters shift. Little’s role is now taken by Jack Antonoff, who first surfaced as guitarist of Fun and went on to produce bits of Taylor Swift’s mighty 1989 album; his bona fides include being Lena Dunham’s boyfriend.
Uber-producer Max Martin might have tutted at the structure of Green Light, but fundamentally, Lorde and Antonoff have drunk Martin’s Kool-Aid, after which everything needs to be too much. Lorde’s breakout hit of 2013, Royals, eye-rolled at the luxe obsessions of distant pop stars. On album two, the pressure doesn't show on this composed but slightly chaotic set of anthems.
Where Pure Heroine – her minimalist, hip-hop-indebted debut – was meticulously pieced together (with producer/enabler Joel Little) well outside pop’s sausage machine, Lorde’s second grew inside one of the bellies of the beast: New York. It has an unenviable act of tonal balance to pull off: yielding glossy ear-crack that will burn its way through Spotify playlists, while retaining Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s signatures: her smeary husk of a voice, her gimlet eye, her outsider’s viewpoint. They’re duetting in ‘Green Light’, the stunning, rule-breaking single, one Lorde coldly observing “Those Great Whites they have big teeth”, the other reacting, breathlessly, “Oh, they bite you”. Lorde 2017 is more Swift and less Del Rey. As a nod to her clearest pop forbearer, her peace is in accepting that she will, sometimes, end up dancing on her own. © 2020 NME is a member of the media division of BandLab Technologies. However, while Heroine cast off the trappings of materialism atop spacious trip-pop, Melodrama catches the mist off of New Wave rhythms that befit the name. Darling, Lorde’s a nightmare dressed like a daydream. “Broadcast the boom-boom-boom-boom/ And make ’em all dance to it,” runs the chorus. ‘The Louvre’ updates Phil Spector’s girl group formula as it imagines Lorde and her partner hanging in The Louvre (“in the back, but who cares, still The Louvre”), ‘Liability’ is a hymnal ballad reminiscent of Mercury Rev’s ‘Deserter’s Songs’ and the string-drenched ‘Sober II (Melodrama)’ is like something from a musical, albeit describing a desolate scene of champagne flute-strewn carnage. The singer’s second album, however, is … “But who cares/ Still the Louvre.”, Available for everyone, funded by readers. Pitchfork is the most trusted voice in music.
Hear a song from a singer who taps their first euphorias, but know it’s merely real adults’ “fetishization.” Try to understand your ever-changing physiology, then have a porcine politician insist that it’s not yours to protect. The message might be that Lorde considers herself wild and flawed and bruised (“I’ll love you till you call the cops on me,” she sings, on the deliciously bitter ‘Writer In The Dark’), but we all do sometimes. The period after Pure Heroine saw Lorde break up with a long-term partner. It’s the kind of connection that, even once it’s gone, lightens your bones forever. Melodrama treats music — both the creation and consumption of it — as an emotional utility, and as much as music has been there during the pivotal moments of …
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