“Fluorescent”—has there ever been a better descriptor for first love? When Lorde sings it to the empty space beside her on “Supercut,” toward the end of her shining record Melodrama, we share a bit of her noted synesthesia: We see that bright, electrode glow of possibility, feel its siren shine on our faces. That neon is too beautiful to last, though; its buzz requires an effortful chemistry.
But when it is gone, the rest need not pale by comparison. The same could be said for one’s teenage years, which the 20-year-old Ella Yelich-O’Connor exits so graciously on this album. That formative era is a fraught time for girls, a dizzying span in which they’re most sought for beauty and cultural cachet yet their perspectives are forcefully minimized. Hear a song from a singer who taps their first euphorias, but know it’s merely real adults’ “fetishization.” Try to understand your ever-changing physiology, then have a porcine politician insist that it’s not yours to protect. And the growing pains feel endless; while it is horrible to be a teen girl who isn’t taken seriously by society, it’s even worse being a young woman unsure what to do with the autonomy that threatens it.
Melodrama is Lorde’s study of being a young woman finding her own conviction in unsteady circumstances. Sometimes, this also involves being single—a breakup and a raucous house party serve as thematic through-lines—but romance is only part of the album’s script. In the difficult, exhilarating course of the record, written largely when Lorde was 18 and 19, her true reward comes with her embrace of self. As a nod to her clearest pop forbearer, her peace is in accepting that she will, sometimes, end up dancing on her own.
Like her 2013 debut Pure Heroine, Melodrama is a work of sleek self-possession, packed with bursts of peculiar rhymes and production that confound expected song formulas. However, while Heroine cast off the trappings of materialism atop spacious trip-pop, Melodrama catches the mist off of New Wave rhythms that befit the name. (Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, in his first production for Lorde, leaves a pliant and romantic thumbprint throughout; Heroine veteran Joel Little also returns.) Its first single and opening track, “Green Light,” casts a long shadow in its anthemic bliss. There’s a reason Max Martin called the New Zealander’s approach “incorrect songwriting”—by no Top 40 rubric should her song fire off, within its first 60 seconds, a spectral synthesizer wobble, a strident line of house piano, a subterranean vocal plunge, and an apropos-of-nothing gear shift that feels like storm clouds ebbing to the sun. Her lyrics, too, occupy an underexplored space; reams have been written about volatile breakups and last-call debauchery, but Lorde rages in a self-aware hedonism, reckless in grief yet knowing that tomorrow her heart will begin to heal. (“But I hear sounds in my mind/Brand new sounds in my mind,” she exults, after thoroughly mocking the bastard in falsetto sing-song.)