Lorde’s Emotional Rush
On her sophomore album with Republic, Melodrama, Lorde paints a colorful portrait of youth on the path to freedom and rebirth in all its vibrant, hedonistic glory. There wasn’t a record that pulled me through all 2017’s changes more than this one.
I drank like a fish and slept with the windows wide open; a heatwave was days away and I wanted to embrace the last taste of cool at the end of Spring. I awoke at the warbled growls of the occasional passing motorbike but soon after drifted back into dreamy sleep.
On a chilly June morning in Paris, I rose at sunrise to listen to Lorde’s sophomore effort Melodrama as it released. As a lead single, “Green Light” was a bucket of glow-in-the-dark neon paint drenching the black-and-grey geometrical canvas the Kiwi artist cautiously crafted in her teens with icy, sparse arrangements. The ensuing album was teased as a thrilling sonic experience and I couldn’t just listen to it any which way. At quarter to seven in the morning, I climbed out my bedroom window to the rooftop six stories above an already-bustling corner of Little Tokyo and watched Parisians line up at a quick stop to buy packs of cigarettes en route to work.
Our rented escape was on Rue Saint-Anne along the border of the 1st and 2nd arrondissements above a heavenly patisserie. I was still smoking at the time — American Spirits, the shitty yellow “Light” variety sold in France, the kind you can’t actually affirm is the yellow pack because a gaping, post-op tracheostomy wound is advertised on the outside — and I lit up on the roof as I put in my earbuds. Melodrama paints thick strokes in deep blues and violets, colors felt on the streets of Paris in the early morning hours, cigarette in hand, eyes puffy and weary from the evening prior. She tells the story of one house party through the track list, albeit indirectly: the drunken heights and the sobered, scary lows feel more intense in the moment and less linear than abstract. Simultaneously, she’s illuminating loneliness while being both invigorated and overwhelmed by it.
“Green Light” begins the record severing ties with a lover…almost. To get the green light to go ahead and get over her ex, she just has to murder the dance floor. Done. The imagery is brilliant (a great white shark attacking her lover… “Hope they bite you”) and the instrumental is euphoric and whacky (power chords, an unsettling key signature change, rippling synths, kick drums at 129 BPM and jangly piano keys). Co-executive producer Jack Antonoff creates an anthemic soundscape that feels like hang-gliding off a cliff; when the horn synths blare at the 3:05 mark, your stomach lurches forward, along for the ride as much as if the ground had just dropped away. The song is laborious, intense and complex, and more rewarding with each listen. Each time she wails, “Oh honey, I’ll come get my things / But I can’t let go,” you feel the pangs of her indecision, her inability to claim just what she wants… “I’m waitin’ for it.” And I’ll be damned if this doesn’t make it 2017’s best running song, encouraging you to picture the Grant Singer-directed music video’s rooftop Uber dance jam while lugging your ass up a long hill and wanting that green light. Day and night, meaty synthesizers pulsed through my brain, wild drums echoed in my eardrums and satisfying harmonies spun on repeat off my lips as I sang my face off to this song in the shower. Cool track, def approve, super great.
The house party continues, and “Sober” slinks in with humidity. In her harmonies are echoes and timbres of Marilyn Manson, her natural apathy for suitors playing coy. It’s like this funky, swampy, erotic rumble that’s also esoteric in that Lorde’s question of their sobriety is entirely hypothetical to her and not to her fling. When the morning comes, it’s whatever. A breakdown befitting a far longer song slips its way in to massive effect here, channeling Kurt Cobain in a low, a capella chant over hypnotic drums. The brass throws the grunge mood for a loop and challenges the listener with containing this many sonic ideas inside a single three-minute track. Ironically, it gets you drunk as hell.
Two songs in and this pop record is already gloriously different and weird, and “Homemade Dynamite” keeps going. Synthesizers sounding like woodwinds twirl, ribbon-like, around the beat in the neatest little fleeting sonic reference to shoegaze, though Jack Antonoff didn’t produce this track (the only one on the album that escaped his touch) and Tove Lo actually co-wrote. Companionship — getting wasted with your friends and loving it — is the happiest high we see on Melodrama, largely a record about being alone, and Lorde revels in her imagery like a beautiful diviner. She has a quick thought about who should drive among the drunk friends and mulls the situation will end in disaster: “We’ll end up painted on the road / Red and chrome, all the broken glass sparkling.” So beautiful and tragic, and just really very Lorde.
I’d touched on “The Louvre” in a previous piece but in context with the whole record, this song fills the spaces between the first-bitten feelings and the low lows to come. The sonic textures here are filtered underwater, warbling through the mock-chorus until the guitar streams in like rays of sunlight at the 1:20 mark. As the song trails, it gives the listener time to reflect on how different the song really was, and it fades to silence as “Liability” begins with seven seconds of the same. This silent time is the quietest stretch on a record full of raucous noise and it’s very unsettling — it makes the ivories hit that much harder when they tumble in, Antonoff giving a tender warmth to the chords he puts down. Lorde’s first piano-driven ballad is fucking heart-wrenching. It carries the full effect of her words, positioning her voice squarely at the forefront of a delicate arrangement that’s the lightest thing she’s tackled. She carries a hip-hop cadence in the track, most notable in the “ah-nah-nah-nah-eh-ev’ryone” line in the chorus, giving the song a rock-solid presence. It’s memorable, and very vulnerable. She goes from professing her self-love to admitting she can only do her best to please herself and she can’t even do that right, and as a young woman writing this record it’s these startlingly vivid, honest, broken descriptions that give the song legs. I can’t muster a self-descriptive word more sad and melancholic than “liability.”
The next track is two-sided: “Hard Feelings” begins with strings and woke lines, like, “I care about myself the way I used to care about you.” The sound of the song is warm in a way, like a hearth that pulls you in to comfort you with a blanket and a cup of tea after you just dumped someone that you didn’t want to. “God, I wished I believed you when you told me this was my home.” This is one of the most grown-up songs on Melodrama, which already sees Lorde accelerating ahead of her teenage and twenty-something peers. The lines are bitter and honest, and the sounds of gnashing metal and machinery toward the end of the half-track are glitchy and perfect. “Loveless,” the second half of the track, intro’d by Paul Simon, picks up with a drum machine that mashes a game of hopscotch with a lugging heartbeat and flips the hard feelings of, well, “Hard Feelings,” on their head with a fuck-you, goodbye, never-wanna-see-you-again smile. It’s delightfully succinct and satisfying like a quick snack. It’s followed by what is ostensibly the title track, “Sober II (Melodrama),” another one with hip-hop draws (the trap beat, hello) that is nothing if not melodramatic. Gorgeous strings and a frighteningly light piano score this conversation Lorde has with herself after that aforementioned party is beginning to end.
“Writer In The Dark” is Lorde’s second piano ballad — on this record or on any, for that matter — and it ups the emotions from “Liability” by lowering the octaves, pacing the writing a little faster, pitching up the chorus to a kooky level and giving Lorde (and all the little Lordes that harmonize with her) the chance to knock out her most remarkable vocal performance to date. The lines are biting, like one in the second verse that stands out, lifted by those ethereal harmonies: “I ride the subway, read the signs / I let the seasons change my mind / I love it here, since I stopped needing you.” Lorde wrote much of Melodrama while a passenger on the New York City Subway, watching faces and places fly by, and sometimes not really fly by at all. Unexpected and unpleasant layovers in subway cars aside, the city reportedly influenced a great deal of the album — Lorde and Antonoff worked together, day and night, in several locations in and around Manhattan, including Electric Lady Studios and Antonoff’s own home studio in Brooklyn. And she’s returning again this week, playing Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on April 4, bringing her Melodrama World Tour back to the streets where the record took on a life of its own. The world is a little darker and more confusing than when she conceived Melodrama and the over-arching conceptual house party she’s trying to throw may fall differently on audiences’ ears now; nevertheless, she creates a vibe entirely her own and relies on few props to get her message across. It’s tracks like this one, stripping her bare and propping her under a spotlight, when we’re able to see her true capabilities as an artist to move her audience and to heal them. “Writer In The Dark” feels like leaving a meeting you’ve been dreading; it’s over, you’re through with it, and you’re walking around Tompkins Square Park on a weekday morning that’s chilly and bright. It’s empowering with remarkable tact and vision for a young writer. But it’s Lorde, and we’re pretty used to hearing all this. She is the future of music, after all.
What comes next inevitably is a song titled after a word so recently created that its coiner credits the song “Supercut” as the term’s first big-league use. Also, it’s maybe the best song on the record. I haven’t made a super firm commitment. Andy Baio used the word “supercut” first in this 2008 blogpost to describe a montage of short, similar video clips. Lorde’s video montage is a highlight reel of a love that is definitely, positively over. Over a surging beat that recalls Robyn’s thrilling “Dancing On My Own”, a conversation (“I’m someone you maybe might love”) teases the possibility of something greater, but common sense also dictates this guy’s maybe not her type. Lorde is a hyper-introspective writer, reflecting here in her head about all she could have done differently, and how embellished her memories seem when ordered in a supercut she herself directed. Lorde makes great pop music because she makes observant, relatable music that outwits lesser “relatable” pop hits penned by Internet bots and Swedish DJs. The juiciness of her lexicon thrills the ears, a veritable medium-rare filet. It’s delicious to listen to a musician flexing her tastes and preferences and concocting a song as persistent and luscious as this.
It’s followed by a precipitous and slightly scary song (not audibly; in terms of sound, it’s pretty and pleasant and mellow). This reprise of the album’s fifth song is, again, introspective, but as a reprise it is reflective where “Liability” was pitiful. Here she dwells on maybes, as in the maybe that asks if this (this love, this party, these people, this night) are all that life is going to be. Remember asking that in your early twenties? I’m still asking it now. But written down on paper, and sung out-loud in lyrical form, it is an acute assertion about what thoughts this 20-year-old and many other 20-year-olds alike are lost in. By reflecting on this idea, Lorde grows beyond it and gains control over it. You’re not what you thought you were, she ends the track, inferring all former presumptions made of her, and all her doubts and worries, were wrong. Or at least they’re wrong now that she’s matured enough to understand they were.
“Perfect Places” closes a blue record with something similar in bombast to opener “Green Light.” Here lie the flashes of hot pink and yellow that dot her album cover in a sing-song chorus driven, anthemic whopper of a final track. Lorde references Melodrama as not a breakup record, but instead a record about “being alone, in all its highs and lows.” How fitting, then, that after a superbly crafted, severely lived-in and critically understood record of angst, indecision, joy, sorrow, lust, you name it — she realizes being alone is not what she thought it was. “Liability (Reprise)” gives in its reflection a perfect transition to an exclamation in “Perfect Places” of the suckiness of living in solitude. Even if it’s just mental solitude, loneliness is not a healthy feeling when prolonged. “Now, I can’t stand to be alone,” Lorde realizes, after feeling all the feels. “Green Light” is a massive song but the sound here is a little bigger, with more front-end torque out of the gate (the beat persists from the moment the track begins and clocks in with extra layers and bells during the chorus). And, because it’s Lorde and she can’t half-ass anything she ends this track, and the album, with a line that questions what she’s even searching for in the first place: “What the hell are perfect places, anyway?” Damn, I dunno, but I’ll keep looking.
I carry great respect for Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor and her badass monosyllabic pseudonym, Lorde. Here in this album lies the proof of her long, toiling sessions and laborious efforts pining over every inch of soundscape, every syllable, stretching frequencies like taffy and bending sounds to make them fit into her colorful puzzle just right. She’s crafted in Melodrama a record for the lonely to relish in their loneliness and feel a little more together with her approachable spirit, while she teaches them to appreciate quality headphones that give new life to these brand new sounds from her mind.
On my first walk alone through New York City, I cruised Madison Avenue near the Flatiron in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. I keep a brisk pace with my long ass legs and I like to match my steps to the beat. I reveled in the swelling synths of “Green Light” and probably broke a sweat, but the smile on my face is one I won’t soon forget. I knew the song well by this point about four months after its release, but my smile was a smile of a realization of something new; a song misshapen and a little disjointed just sounded so right to me all over again and I felt as if I was listening to something very important in the grand scheme of the shape of pop music. Like it was calling for me to recognize that Lorde is the future of music. But I was alone when I first heard that message.
