Album Review: Lorde Proves She’s the Mightiest Pop Star on “Melodrama”

Katy and Taylor can keep the beef. We’ll take Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s Melodrama instead.

We spent so much time gawking at the Katy Perry/Taylor Swift feud, we forgot Lorde’s the one backing up her claim for the pop crown with infectious hooks, intimate lyrics and magnificently baroque singles.

Four years after her sparse, drum machine-driven Pure Heroine, the prodigious Kiwi returns a little older, a little wiser and a lot more familiar with the intricacies of proper onion ring battering on Melodrama.

Now 20, she’s got more stories to tell than she did at 16, when getting on her first plane was enough to warrant its own tune, as on Pure Heroine’s dryly funny “Tennis Court”. (Even more than the sarcastically aspirational “Royals”, “Tennis Court” captured Yelich-O'Connor's ability to be apathetic, dreamy and self-deprecating at the same time. It’s also, inarguably, the better banger.)

The record is conceptually designed to mirror the ups and downs of a house party, starting with the butterflies-fluttering-in-the-stomach overture “Green Light”, which promises "brand new sounds", and delivers. It winds up with Jack Antonoff’s simple, swirling piano scales (the fun. frontman co-wrote almost every track with Yelich-O'Connor) and bursts into full colour during the chorus, atop a choir of shrieking Lordettes. Yes, it takes just three minutes for Ella to deliver on the second half of her album title. (You’ll have to wait a bit longer for the ‘mellow’.)

Second track, “Sober”, plays like the evolution of “Tennis Court”, complete with wry ennui and bombastic production. On it, Ella sultrily tells someone, “my hips have missed your hips”, interrupting herself to wonder, “but what will we do when we’re sober?”

It’s followed by “Homemade Dynamite”, a stuttering song about—and transparently for—partying. Except, it stops part way through for Yelich-O’Connor to make a soft “ppwwww” noise, like a fake explosion. This, in Lorde’s world, is the drop. The whole thing is irresistible.

Her sense of humour cheekily pokes its head out again on “The Louvre”, a running-through-the-museum, never-gonna-die anthem that’s equal parts Bananarama and Bruce Springsteen, where she tells her love, “they’ll hang us in Louvre, down the back, but who cares—still the Louvre.”

The laughter dies down on “Liability”, her off-kilter heartbreak ballad. “You’re a little much for me, you’re a liability,” she sings. Compare that to Katy Perry’s attempt at really-makes-you-think profundity on Witness nadir “Save As Draft”: “I don’t f*** with change, but lately I’ve been flipping coins a lot.” Pop—even in its most diaristic, confessional form—can still be artful without inspiring eye rolls. That might even be Lorde's greatest skill: making the super-specific sound oh-so-relatable.

Yelich-O'Connor's seemingly spent the last four years toiling over a musical cauldron, stirring in hair of Stevie Nicks, eye of Kate Bush, tail of Karin Dreijer Andersson and sting of Carly Rae Jepsen. That seems especially the case on the sinister Side B, divided from Side A by the transformative, strobe-lit “Hard Feelings/Loveless”. Later comes the menacing “Sober II (Melodrama)", which wouldn’t be out of place on Kanye West’s Yeezus, and “Writer in the Dark”, about a musician who cannibalises her relationships for the sake of content (a self-awareness absent on Swift's 1989), lifted by the choir of Lordettes, doing their best “Wuthering Heights” impression, trilling: “I'll love you 'til my breathing stops/ I'll love you 'til you call the cops on me.”

Closers “Supercut” and “Perfect Places” are the most Jepsen-like and exuberant, though they’re emotional opposites. The first is earnest and sentimental; the second, suspicious and guarded. When Lorde said Melodrama would tell the tale of a house party, we should have suspected that it wouldn’t be all fun, all the time. She’s no longer the teen waiting for an invite to hang; now she’s on the inside, looking out.

“What the f*** are perfect places, anyway?” is the question that ends her sophomore record. We don’t know, Ella, but anywhere playing Melodrama is at least a good start.

4.5/5

Melodrama is now available.

Photo: Republic