Pop icon Lorde is set for global domination as her new LP Melodrama reaches top of the album charts in New Zealand, Australia, Canada AND the USA. And she's not even old enough to down a celebratory drink in America yet. At just 20 years old this Kiwi cool kid is smashing the music industry. Her debut album Pure Heroine was a resounding suc-cess launching Lorde into pop stardom and yet it only managed to reach number 3 on the Billboard 200 chart in 2014. After a four year wait her follow up has secured that elu-sive number one spot, selling an impressive 109,000 album units in one week. This is Lorde’s first number one in the American album charts and she was quick to tweet the good news to her fans.
Melodrama is the older sister to a hyperactive eager teen debut. Gone are the frivolous and indulgent electronic bops of a rebellious youth. Lorde has taken these 4 years to mature and mellow. She’s shaken off the egotistic pretenses of a young girl trying to fit into the clique of pop culture. Lorde has realized she doesn’t need to follow the crowd, or shape her music to fit a generic mold. This album marks the defiant howl of the leader of a new kind of pack.
Being different is in her blood, well rather in her genes. Lorde suffers from the rare neuro-logical condition synesthesia. It’s a perceptual condition in which the senses become simultaneously stimulated - to put it simply your senses become combined. Someone might taste touch sensations or smell colors, Lorde sees colors when she hears sounds. This has directly influenced the way she creates music, in fact she owes much of her individuality to it. She knows what she likes and exactly what she wants because the colors of each sound will appeal to her.
“You pick a chord then all of a sudden there's this flood of a different color or a different texture. It's exciting and it's strange and it makes everything feel a little bit more vivid”
Interview with VEVO UK (May 2017)
Every musical decision is hinged on these colorful displays that only she can sense. Re-sultantly she often rejects generic and conventional “pre-packaged” beats and melodies that typically sell records. Lorde’s new sounds are authentic and personal.
intimate and poetically considered. It has a soul of confessional lyrics and a rich backbone of piano, synthesizers and breathtaking vocals. It is unconventional and jar-ring in a refreshing way, but still melodic enough to satisfy the genre’s earmarks. The songs overflow with emotion, ranging from lust and romance to grief and self-doubt, each song telling relatable tales of a girl maturing into womanhood. Lorde is presenting us with her memoir of tumultuous self-realization. It is brutally honest, at times witty and overall a pure expression of self that we rarely see in Pop.
Melodrama marks a significant triumph for women in American music as it becomes the third album by a female in a row at number 1 on the chart, after Katy Perry’s Witness, and Halsey’s Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, which hasn't occurred for 7 years. Let’s hope this girl power takeover is a recurring theme for 2017.
By: Cosima Lara Wood
Contact: cosimalara@gmail.com