Revisited: How Lorde’s debut album challenged pop music at the time

On Lorde’s debut album Pure Heroine, she opens ‘Tennis Court’ by saying, “Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk? Making smart with their words again, well I’m bored.”

This could simply be about people who gossip, but I’d like to believe there’s something deeper here. This to me was a very calculated way to start an album; especially a debut album. It’s a proclamation, a statement if you will, that Lorde was bored of what was going on in pop music and that she was going to put her own stamp on the world by challenging it with her own perspective.

Now, before we slip deeper into this article, let’s step back. Before Lorde dropped her debut album and before she dropped her debut EP The Love Club, where breakout song ‘Royals’ came from, she was just simply Ella Yellich O’Connor, a 16-year-old girl from New Zealand. And being from New Zealand is a huge aspect of her music. Her outsider perspective looking inside the world of pop is what made her music rich, and what made ‘Royals’ so much of a smash record.

In an interview with VEVO, she explains how the song came to be: “I was listening to a lot of hip-hop and I kind of started to realize that to be cool in hip-hop, you have to have that sort of car and drink that sort of vodka and have that sort of watch, and I was like, ‘I’ve literally never seen one of those watches in my entire life.’”

And that’s why ‘Royals’ opens up with the lyrics, “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh,” and in the pre-chorus dives deeper into the message of the song with, “But every song’s like gold teeth, grey goose, trippin’ in the bathroom, bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room, we don’t care; We’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams.” The whole song is questioning pop music from an outsider’s perspective and that’s why it resonated so well with the world.

In another interview, this time with MTV News, Lorde said, “People who listen to Top 40 radio aren’t as stupid as ‘Aw yeah, Shawty in the club,’ you know?” she continued. “People have a brain, and I think you can combine saying something clever with saying something in a highly accessible way.” And she was doing it. Her clever wordplay backed with her incredible vocals, back in 2013, she was doing it.

And we couldn’t help but notice the juxtaposition between Lorde and Miley Cyrus at the time. They were each other’s polar opposites. With Cyrus’ 2013 album, Bangerz, Cyrus was glorifying all the things Lorde was questioning. By watching Cyrus’ video for ‘We Can’t Stop’ and listening to Lorde’s ‘Royals’, you could see the vast difference between these two pop stars.

With Lorde, there was a sense of fresh air in the pop world, being compared to the time when Adele came out and dropped her debut 19 back in 2008. No crazy music videos or PR stunts, just an artist and their artistry.

On her debut album Pure Heroine, Lorde once again kicks things off with ‘Tennis Court’ (“Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk? Making smart with their words again, well I’m bored.”) On the last song on the album, ‘A World Alone’, Lorde ends it by saying, “The people are talking, the people are talking, the people are talking, let em’ talk.”

Lorde was bored with how pop music was being played out in front of her back in New Zealand, with all the talk of grey goose and the gold teeth and she made music to challenge that perception, and the world took notice.

Now, Lorde has returned with new music in the form of ‘Green Light’ from her forthcoming album, Melodrama. And unsurprisingly, it’s already amassed over 30 million plays on YouTube.

With numbers like these, not including any streams on other music platforms, it’s a message to her music contemporaries that genuine songwriting will always connect with an audience. Her success in 2013 was no fluke. When you challenge music like Lorde has over the years, you aren’t just an artist that is in the pop world, you’re an artist that moulds it. In her case, for the better.

Lorde’s new album, Melodrama, is out on June 16th. Head here to listen to ‘Liability’ and here for ‘Green Light’.

This story first appeared on The 405