Lorde

Lorde

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Melodrama
    Melodrama
    Melodrama

    Lorde’s introspective debut, 2013’s Pure Heroine, turned her into a global star—a turn of events she all but predicted: “How can I fuck with the fun again when I’m known?” she sang on “Tennis Court,” seemingly aware that her primary inspiration up to that point—namely, boredom in suburbia—would be rendered inaccessible by her imminent fame. Four years later, she answered that question with her second album, Melodrama. While Pure Heroine concerned itself with the minutiae of teenage life in Auckland, Melodrama is broader in its reach, detailing heartbreak and hedonism following her first serious breakup. Lorde’s musical themes underwent a big change on Melodrama—as did her music-making process. Pure Heroine had been written and produced by a two-person team consisting of Lorde and Joel Little. For Melodrama, she’d recruit such top-tier producers as Kuk Harrell, Malay, and S1. Most significantly, all but one of Melodrama’s 11 tracks were cowritten with Jack Antonoff, best known as Taylor Swift’s right-hand man since 2013. But even with all those new names by her side, Lorde remains as idiosyncratic as ever on Melodrama. The lead single, “Green Light,” begins as a piano ballad before revving into a house track—only to finally explode into a euphoric chanted chorus accompanied by drums, handclaps, bass, and strings. It’s a chaotic and unexpected finale, capturing the agony and ecstasy of being newly single. Elsewhere on the album, “Supercut” is similarly bittersweet, retracing the happiest moments of a failed relationship with help from a driving house piano and overlaid vocals. “Liability,” meanwhile, strips things back, harnessing a simple descending chord sequence and lyrics about being “too much” to devastating effect. And “Writer In the Dark” is a spare ballad about alchemizing heartbreak into art, with a cracked soprano vocal recalling mid-career Kate Bush. As a sophomore effort, Melodrama is as unexpected as it is triumphant—the first indication that this is an artist uninterested in retracing her own steps. After all, Lorde works in mysterious ways.

  • Pure Heroine
    Pure Heroine
    Pure Heroine

    100 Best Albums During the aughts, the teen-pop pantheon was a sea of sugary-sweet lyrics, misappropriated school uniforms, and twerking Disney stars. Then came Lorde. On Pure Heroine, her 2013 debut album, the Auckland-born singer-songwriter eschews bubblegum pop and stage-school grins, and instead focuses on the realities of suburban teenage ennui. This is an album that declares its disillusionment from the very first track, “Tennis Court,” which opens with the line, “Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?” Arriving at a moment when chart music was dominated by air horns, Auto-Tuned vocals, and four-four house beats, Pure Heroine offered a welcome antidote to the party-hearty pop of the time, relying instead on restrained, almost growled, vocals set to skeletal, programmed beats. The album’s centerpiece—and the song that propelled the singer-songwriter born Ella Yelich-O’Connor to the global stage—is “Royals,” which describes the inherent disconnect of being a broke schoolkid listening to luxe-life rap tunes: “But every song's like, 'Gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin' in the bathroom'/We don't care/We're driving Cadillacs in our dreams.” A song about the absurdity of fame, “Royals” became one of the biggest hits of the 21st century, moving more than 10 million units in the US alone. Elsewhere on Pure Heroine, Lorde recounts the trials of being an introvert in the internet age, pairing tales of platonic sleepovers, aimless drives, and long walks home with throbbing synths and muffled percussion. The album’s best song, “Ribs,” builds from a pulsing, ambient start to a euphoric cascade of overlaid vocals (“This dream isn’t feeling sweet/We’re reeling through the midnight streets/And I’ve never felt more alone/It feels so scary getting old”). It’s a moment in which the album’s detached, almost anesthetized tone makes way for something more visceral. Pure Heroine marked the advent of a star wise beyond her years (so much so, one website bought a copy of Lorde’s birth certificate from the New Zealand government, to prove that she wasn’t an imposter). And the album’s success made room for a new raft of teenage stars, including Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, who could make music as moody and menacing as adolescence itself.

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About Lorde

Where previous generations of teenagers frequently had to endure marketing managers’ ideas of what entertainment should look like, millennial teens were blessed with one of pop culture’s greatest young laureates: New Zealand’s Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (a.k.a. Lorde). After being spotted at a talent show and signing to Universal at age 12, she would experiment with a series of writing partners before meeting Joel Little, a fellow Auckland native and former pop-punk frontman. Together, they wrote “Royals,” a song that not only defined Lorde’s perspective—with its unimpressed, teenage dismissal of material obsessions—but also propelled her skeletal electro-pop debut, 2013’s Pure Heroine, to a Grammy nomination. She captured the late-night trains home, clandestine kisses, and heavy symbolism of one’s first love remembering to buy them their favorite juice—little of which, she seemed to know, lasts. But Lorde’s feel for suburban adolescent disconnect catalyzed into precocious power moves—such as curating the soundtrack for the third Hunger Games movie—and an astute lens on the wider world on 2017’s Melodrama. Richer in sound and experience, the album found strength in different kinds of isolation—the temporary plight of the newly heartbroken and the lifelong fate of the writer. However, Lorde would steer that fate in a new direction with 2021’s breezy, Laurel Canyon-hued Solar Power. On the album, she basks in psych-folk, sunshine pop, and tongue-in-cheek euphoria while offering a peek into her reality. “My life is very low-key and very domestic. It's like the life of a hippie housewife,” she told Apple Music. That confession may be a jarring contrast to Lorde’s dark-pop reputation, but it only adds to her mystique.

HOMETOWN
Auckland, New Zealand
BORN
November 7, 1996
GENRE
Alternative

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