You probably best know Lorde from her hit single “Royals”. In the song, the sixteen-year-old songwriter Ella Yealich-O’Connor takes us through her disenchantment with pop culture’s obsession with opulence. She croons, “Every song is like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom… but we don’t care, we’re not caught up in your love affair.” Later on in the five-song EP, “The Love Club” performs a similar takedown of popularity and the dynamics of social power in high school. The refreshingly down-to-earth perspective of such lyrics has brought Lorde great success: “Royals” spent a record-breaking seven weeks on top of Billboard’s Alternative Music chart and two weeks at the number one on the Hot 100.
Two magazine covers, a Rolling Stone article and millions of YouTube plays later, the debut album was released. “Pure Heroine” opened at number three, competing with veteran chart toppers like JT and Drake. But this is not music for Pub Nite or even pledge night — it’s moody and sarcastic, and deeply skeptical of the teenage party scene altogether. The album was co-written and produced by Joel Little, best known as the front man of New Zealand punk rock band Goodnight Nurse. He also worked on the Love Club EP and “Royals” with the singer. His work with Lorde is characterized by sparse electronic kit beats, heavy reverb and simple analog synths. The texture derives a lush tone from the layered vocals. The dizzying effect of these vocal harmonies is best heard in “Ribs” and “Buzzcut Season,” which both feature spiraling audio that jumps between the left and right speakers.
Singing above the rich harmonies and modern production, Lorde’s smoky Lana-esque voice gives us classic pop melodies. The opening track, “Tennis Courts”, rivals “Royals” for its catchy pop hook and the signature melodic writing of the pre-chorus. “Team”, with its blues scale tonality and pitch bent repetition (think of the hook in “Everyday I see my Dream”), has clearly taken lessons from top forty hits. What really distinguishes Lorde from her fellow pop artists is not the music, but the words — no surprise that Yealich O’Connor initially aspired to be a novelist. Lyrically, “Pure Heroine” verges on brilliance. It is just rebellious enough in its tone. It’s more accessible than the influences the young singer cites (yeasayer and SBTRKT for example), and yet it retains much of the spirit of alternative music.
The album opens with the question, “Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?” Lorde boldly admits her boredom and calls out her peers for the hollow fun that they seek. She grants only that the fun “looked alright in the pictures.” She rejects any tenets of popularity that she posed in “The Love Club” or “Bravado” earlier this year. The sixteen-year-old’s disillusionment with mainstream social culture provides a consistent lyrical theme throughout the album. In “Team”, she repeats, “I’m kind of over getting to told to throw my hands up in the air — so there.” A feeling we can all relate to.
This brutal honesty is paired with a broad palette of other emotions; dark, Marina & the Diamonds-style social commentary in “Glory and Gore,” bitter angst in “A World Alone” and even dreamy, near bubbly moments in “White Teeth Teens.”
So listening to the new album “Pure Heroine” may provoke existential crises. Or it may just make you feel like a sullen teenage rebel. Either way, the young singer’s roots are actually deeply commercial. At the age of twelve, she signed for development with Universal, the corporation that owns Def Jam, Octone and several other prominent labels. Universal artists range from Bieber to Bjork, from LMFAO to MIA and beyond. The label set her up to work with her producer, Little, who wrote most of the music (though not the lyrics) for “Pure Heroine.” Lorde has a performance featured on the soundtrack of the upcoming Universal Pictures “Hunger Games” sequel. And for all her support from the alternative music community — Grimes, for example, is a fan — many people attribute the initial success of “Royals” to a cover performed by Selena Gomez in a stadium concert packed with white teeth teens of all ages.
Now, as Yealich-O’Connor herself pointed out in an interview with the Grammy Awards, just because she’s a pop artist with substantial industry backing doesn’t mean her music has to be shallow or trite — and after listening to only thirty seconds of her album, you can hear that it isn’t. But listening to Lorde means embracing that she is by no means an underground phenomena and she has by no means rejected the celebrity culture to which she is now privy; just google “Lorde and Taylor Swift”, “Lorde and Selena Gomez”, or more recently “Lorde and Joe Jonas” to read the details of a lightly philosophical and heavily juvenile celebrity feud.
So what does it mean to be a pop artist profiting from widespread resentment of social culture? To be an “alternative” musician created by a corporate megalodon of artistic expression? To reject the idolatry of teen icons and then morph into one?
Maybe Lorde answers this one best herself: she “wears the robe like no one could.”
