It’s been four years since
the release of Lorde’s debut album, Pure Heroine. A long time, especially for someone so young, but one listen to Melodrama is enough to realise that this time and space was necessary for this album to bloom in the way that it has. In the words of Lorde herself, “it takes some time to map the inside of a brain.”
During these four years Ella Yelich-O’Connor has grown up, for one thing. Or perhaps “growing”, the continuous tense, is a better choice of verb. If Pure Heroine was teenage claustrophobia, Melodrama is the wide, open spaces of young adulthood, strange and euphoric in equal measure. Most songs about adolescence are written in retrospect, but Lorde is still only twenty, which gives her music a sense of urgency.
It’s a record that requires multiple listens to fully appreciate it, for Melodrama is an album of “growers”, of sudden realisations that “oh this is actually really quite good” after the second or third time you hear a song. There aren’t many radio-friendly hits, catchy hooks or generic choruses that get stuck in your head with the sheer force of their familiarity. “when i was a kid i thought big records had to be made a certain way—to be sterile & calculated in craft; that something had to be sacrificed,” Lorde tweeted after the album reached number one in America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “i have had the divine thrill of disproving that firsthand, twice over.” And disprove it she has. These are the best type of pop songs, capturing universal feelings but in a way that is so far from conventional.
The album opens with ‘Green Light’, a soaring anthem of heartbreak reminiscent of Robyn and ‘Dancing on my Own’. There’s euphoria in its piano riff, carefree to a point of near desperation, but there’s still an underlying anger. This is a break-up song, and the wounds are still raw. The continuous tense is relevant again here: “I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it.”
a concept album in a loose sense of the term
On a completely different note is ‘Liability’, quiet and sad; words you can imagine Lorde muttering softly to herself in the bathroom of a party or as she stumbles home in the dark. “I’m a little much for everyone,” she hums, almost matter of fact. Indeed, Lorde has said that Melodrama is set at a house party, a concept album in a loose sense of the term. Listening to it brings to mind one that takes place on a summer night; hot, humid, and fraught with nervous energy. “Summer slipped us underneath her tongue / our days and nights are perfumed with obsession,” is the opening line of ‘The Louvre’, one of my personal favourites on the album.
Second single ‘Perfect Places’ encapsulates the high stakes, melodramatic adolescence of the album’s title; “every night I live and die,” Lorde sings. “I hate the headlines and the weather / I’m nineteen and I’m on fire.” Meanwhile tracks such as ‘Hard Feelings’ are permeated with meandering instrumentals, culminating in ‘Writer in the Dark’, which sweeps you up into big, all-encompassing emotions.
That’s what I love most about this album – the pure unadulterated, unapologetic emotion. There is no irony, no playing it cool. It takes time to map the inside of a brain, but Lorde has mapped it well.
