There will come a time when critics stop talking about Lorde's age. But we're not quite there yet. Because for now, it's impossible to ignore how she as an artist, as a person, as a brand defies our every preconception of what it means to be a 20-year-old. There's a duality to both Lorde's personality and writing that at once takes part in frivolous youth culture and steps back and critiques it. And this makes sense, since Lorde had anything but a normal teenage experience.
By the time she was 17, the entire world knew Ella Yelich-O'Connor as Lorde. She won two Grammys, played the biggest festivals on the planet, and became friends with Taylor Swift. Yet, in a move that's almost unheard of in the internet age, after touring Pure Heroine, Lorde mostly retreated from fame back to her own life. Not completely, of course, but she stayed out of the tabloids, away from the drama, and avoided any sort of scandal.
And it's her own life, not her famous one, that serves as the inspiration for her sophomore album Melodrama. She's been to the same parties, she's had the same wild nights, the confusing flings, the identity crises, but she's the one who along the way seems to be writing her every experience in her phone's notepad. Lyrically, Lorde feels of-the-moment, analyzing youth in real time. Here's how she introduces the album's theme on "Sober II (Melodrama)":
You asked if I was feeling it, I'm psycho high / Know you won't remember in the morning when I speak my mind / Lights are on and they've gone home, but who am I? / Oh, how fast the evening passes, cleaning up / The champagne glasses / We told you this was melodrama
How many teenagers treat their hangover as a chance for existential reflection? There's something else to this too. As a brand, she doesn't try to clean up her language or adult situations for her young audience. When Taylor Swift was 21, she was still telling the safe, Disney-friendly fairy tales of "Love Story." Lorde is honest about drugs, drinking, hook-ups, run-ins with the police. Maybe these are personal experiences, maybe they're what a famous lonely writer perceives a normal young adult life to be. Either way, it seems tragic and insightful and relatable. There's the image on "Writer in the Dark," where Lorde is riding the New York subway (which she, alone, loves!) by herself addressing a past love. Lorde, refreshingly, skipped the normal stages of pop star that Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, and Justin Bieber went through. There was no innocence, rebellion, sexual awakening, followed by serious artist. Lorde has always been all of these at once—a fully formed human ready for the art to come first and all the other bullshit to come second.
And this fascination extends to Lorde's sound, too. It never fully embraces EDM, hip-hop, classic influences like David Bowie, pop radio, club music, and Kate Bush. Rather, Lorde's music is all of these at once—a single influence never overpowering the rest. It's melodically captivating too, because Lorde, who says she has sound-to-color synesthesia, writes in the Mixolydian mode—meaning it's hard to pinpoint if her music is happy or sad. Melodramatic is a good descriptor, but even that doesn't do the sound justice, where even her pop-focused songs like "Green Light" have an uneasy neither major nor minor melody. The only reason Lorde's sound might seem familiar today, is because when she was 16 she influenced an entire wave of copycats including established acts like Selena Gomez. Even her straightforward ballads have their own Lorde twist, like her phrasing on "Liability," in which she plays with the elasticity of her words. She speeds up to nearly rapping the words. She tumbles over measures, doubles the beat, then smoothes out for the chorus. She builds the excitement to a beautiful chord change. And even here, is she happy or sad? I want to believe it's a little bit of both.
It almost belittles Lorde's talent to obsess over her age. Because she's so much more than a child prodigy. And that's far from the most fascinating thing about her. At the same time, though, she's singlehandedly broken the pop star formula. And though she's wise beyond her 20 years, directing the sound of pop music in ways that have baffled even Katy Perry, it's important to remember that Lorde really is a kid who just wants to review onion rings on Instagram.
