Lorde: ‘Melodrama’ Review
9.0
GENRE: Pop/Synthpop
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2017“I do my makeup in somebody else’s car.” That is Lorde’s opening statement on her sophomore album, Melodrama. The little fragment summarizes a succession of wrong decisions described on a record that, as its name suggests, is loaded with turmoil and effervescent emotions. Lorde, who’s had a bright career singing prematurely about the drawbacks of being a grownup, set herself apart from other singers her age because she didn’t spend her songs pretending to be wiser than she was. With blasting synths and loose pianos, her second LP narrates the life of a twenty-year-old woman who isn’t afraid of being unapologetically young. As such, Melodrama tracks the singer stumbling through rough nights: getting ready, getting high with friends, returning home alone, feeling blue—opening track “Green light” was the upbeat equivalent of Tove Lo’s “Habits.” Dancing off breakups at the club, Lorde makes clear, can be messy—too many lights and sounds, too much euphoria, too big of a comedown.
Love is a synthetic drug. The high it gives makes you sweat, the low it puts in makes your jaw tremble. On Melodrama, Lorde’s high never ceases: not in the collective frenzy of “Homemade Dynamite,” not in the solitude of the piano ballad “Liability.” The album is an exhilarating journey throughout the recognition of the mundane symptoms of being helplessly young, the acceptance of romance failure, and the glimmering intent of finding the self. Four years passed between the singer’s acclaimed debut record Pure Heroine and Melodrama—eons in the pop world, a risk that few artists on the market can afford to take. It could be argued that the lengthy hiatus helped up the hype for the record, but that would be to reduce Lorde’s intellectual songwriting skills to mere chance. Listening to the record, you can see that nothing about the album, apart from the events that unfolded into those songs, happened by chance. Each beat was millimetrically placed, each synthesizer systematically programmed by producer Jack Antonoff, each piano key played with precise fingers.
Melodrama is a soundtrack to jumping fully clothed in the pool, losing yourself in the sweaty body of strangers, looking for your friend who went to the bathroom two hours ago and never came back. Simultaneously, it’s the muffled sound you hear when the lights turn on and the sun peeks through the nightclub door, your damp hair falling on your forehead, your phone running out of battery. Your self-sufficient alter-ego leaves your body, your needy self holds your hand in the taxi. Lorde wrote about these feelings between the ages of 18-19 and released the songs at 20. Her premature panoramic views on romantic disgrace were embraced by people ten-plus years older because these are situations hard to outgrow. And then there’s the ecstasy-induced production, way less economical than that of Pure Heroine. Her vocals sound less like growls and more like eloquent, animated confessions. And that’s the evolution Melodrama conveys: she was no longer a bored teenager with untidy hair sitting alone in the corner. Instead, she was hanging with the cool kids, juggling down drinks, journaling human depravations in her mind, rhyming about them.
The collection of slinky club bangers and intimate ballads are embodied by Lorde’s semi-conceptual observational skills—much of the album is written as if the singer left her body and lurked into scenes in a third-person perspective. That is the case with “Liability” (“All that a stranger would see/Is one girl swaying alone, stroking her cheek). This self-awareness permeates Melodrama with the sensorial attention of someone who knows their talents as a songwriter and is not afraid of self-deprecating themselves. She knows her insecurities and displays them with vibrating, fluorescent colors. “I overthink your punctuation use,” she confesses on “The Louvre,” a clever, heart-skippy track empowered by glitchy electro-pop beats. These hints of borderline manic behavior are a common characteristic of falling in love—let’s face it, we’ve all been there—but few pop stars can capture it so cleverly, let alone distribute it into radiophonic music.
Melodrama has been so widely discussed in the media that it’s hard to detain your opinion from being biased and stained by other people’s. But the record is one of the few that one can’t seem to feel divided about. Each song is as graphic as a mid-century novel, and on each one of them, Lorde takes you by the hand and walks you straight into the insides of her head, leaving no room for alternate interpretations. It’s her story; she already did all the work and research. You just have to let yourself in through the neon fog and feel the lasers, the stroboscope, and the vibrating booms. The plots are obvious: you fall in love, you fall out of love, and, luckily, you find yourself aftward. With all its distinctiveness, Melodrama is unapologetically a pop record. What makes it so great is the non-pretending it isn’t and admitting it is what every pop record should aspire to be.
9.0
Listen to Melodrama:
