Lorde: ‘Solar Power’ Review
7.0
GENRE: Pop
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2021Green juice. Herbal teas. Meditation. Psychedelic shrooms. The beach. Lorde’s third album, Solar Power, sounds a lot like the brochure of a cult led by a millennial. The singer spends the record stepping up to and down from the leader role—at times indirectly accepting it, at times directly rejecting it—and singing about the downsides of being considered a messianic pop star after Melodrama. Here, Lorde exchanges the slinky beats and fidgeting synthesizers of her previous LP for stripped-down balladry about finding the right path, channeling a beach vibe, and not doing anything ambitious. She slouches deeper into contemplating songwriting, talking about her relationship with nature and hinting at a mid-twenties life crisis.
Melodrama was extremely vibrant, too fluorescent to sustain at times. It’s no wonder Lorde wanted a change. Reinventions are a natural phenomenon in music, and they often happen because artists are either too afraid to be boxed in a specific category or brave enough to innovate. Or both. With Solar Power, Lorde sought to distance herself from the previous superhero pop-gold maker position, settling for music made mostly for herself. She puts away the cathartic crescendos and brings out calmer melodies, singing about the sun multiple times throughout the record, preaching her new serene lifestyle to you, constantly discussing self-development. “Cause all the music you loved at 16 you'll grow out of/And all the times they will change, it'll all come around,” she croons on “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” a song produced by the omnipresent Jack Antonoff and with borrowed backing vocals from Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers.
Lorde began her career singing about uneasy feelings and situations over catchy, bright-colored arrangements. Even when she sang of disillusionment and boredom, it sounded like happiness because of her always joyful melodies. But here, she inverts the formula and sings about natural beauty over ominous, unsettling chord progressions. It works on some of the tracks: “The Path,” in which the singer rejects being worshiped as a savior, is one of the best songs of her career. Her honesty here is not a cause for immediate empathy—it’s hard to feel bad for millionaire teens when they talk about being millionaire teens as if it’s a terrible thing—but it’s still admirable. “Mood Ring,” the catchiest song on the record, is billed as a satire about people who try to enhance their spirituality through shallow ways—a very similar concept to Hulu’s show Nine Perfect Strangers. Both the show and the song failed to be simple enough so people could understand their reasoning, but Lorde’s single has a much better rhythm—and its music video shows her in a much better blond wig. Sorry, Nicole Kidman.
The rest of the album dilutes the title track’s promise of endless joy, not only because she is no savior, as she puts it, but because the bliss of beach days isn’t always present on Solar Power. The aura of summer gets a little ruined by Lorde’s constant anthropological observations, like when you go to the beach and it rains the whole day so you pick up a book and stay indoors. She reflects upon issues around the world, analyzes her internal changes over the years, and looks back at her emo days with poignant lyrics (“Now the cherry-black lipstick's gathering dust in a drawer”). The most happiness on the album comes from witnessing the singer realize that the first person she needs to make happy is herself. “Do your best to trust all the rays of light,” she sings to herself on “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All),” which features a cringy monologue from Robyn around a baggage claim metaphor. Ironically, Solar Power as a whole does not have the sense of urgency one feels to pick up their luggage and go home after a long flight.
On Solar Power, Lorde is in no rush. The album’s atmosphere is laid-back to the core, and sometimes it feels like the singer is watching the beach from inside a cave, stuck in reveries of what being on an actual beach must feel like. From its music videos to its visual identity, the album’s archetypical concept is trite, almost screaming desperately about being a summer record. The music is quiet and broody, repeatedly falling in the melancholic lane, with no urge to be more than that. Lorde is a sensational songwriter, and her lyrics here are pretty good, just not as engaging as her previous ones. The question is: will she settle for pretty good, or will she go back to chasing gutsy sounds and staggering productions? Let’s hope the sun will bring us an answer.
Listen to Solar Power:
