Album Review: Lorde’s “Melodrama” Shows Growing Up Is A Lonely Experience

Lorde’s sophomore album was a strange realization of something I never noticed about growing up. In her first Heroine, nearly every track was about feeling apart of a lone pack. You and a group of friends riding the waves of social insecurity and feelings of personal invincibility. Yet, her new album. Melodrama, is all about feeling like a loner.
Lorde – Green Light (Live From The 2017 Billboard Music Awards)

I never realized that, in highschool, which is when Lorde wrote her excellent debut, Heroine, that we are so interconnected with our friends that “me” becomes interchangeable with “us”. Your friends are you, and you are your friends. Hence, the melancholy of Melodrama derives from the loss of that sentiment. Now 20, Lorde, especially, knows that in life, your ultimate, only, and most consistent friend, is you. Songs like, “Liability” and “Supercut” are absolutely about the loneliness and ferocity that comes over you when you see the truth. You can either cave to the reality of being your only “backup” or own it like a queen, which does empower you to have good relationships or, at least, a good time. “Homemade Dynamite”, “Perfect Places”, and “Sober” do have sonic echoes to her earlier albums in heavy basslines and the idea that nothing like a good group of friends to get lit. Still, the “pop” fascination with Lorde’s Melodrama comes with the acceptance that growing up is a lonely experience, in which the openness to friends in your teenage years becomes a selectivity of lovers/friends in your twenties, i.e. the melodrama. While the songstress pushes her sound in tracks “Green Light” and “Harder Feelings/ Loveless”, again, it is when she, lyrically, goes into her heart that she shines, as in “Writer In The Dark”. Lorde, like everyone, does well when she is simple and vulnerable because that the essence of humanity. When we let go of facades, no matter we age, she shine in truth. For More Information On Lorde And To Buy Melodrama Click Here.
Lorde – Liability (Live On SNL/2017)