Lorde
Melodrama

Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, known as Lorde (1996), has arrived at her second album in her career. The worldwide success of her debut album Pure Heroine, released in 2013 and driven by the single "Royals", made her, still seventeen, one of the most famous and appreciated pop stars in the world (famously endorsed by David Bowie, who described the young artist as "the future of music"). The new Melodrama, described by the author as "an album about being alone, with its pros and cons", seems to be inspired by Lorde's separation from her partner, which occurred at the end of 2015. Written and produced in close collaboration with Jack Antonoff, guitarist of Fun and already co-author for Taylor Swift, the album debuted in the first position of the Billboard Top 200.

In 2013, amidst a pop scene increasingly dominated by maximalist productions, the sober art-pop elegance of "Royals" represented in its own way a small and genuine revolution, as well as the first example of Lorde's precocious talent. "Green Light", released in March of this year and the first single from the new album, marked a radical change of course: a verse with a compelling pace, a break leading to an airy bridge, guided by an aerodynamic piano, and finally a choral and liberating refrain, accompanied by tribal percussion and sung with cathartic passion; somewhat a synthesis of the musical "melodrama" Lorde stages for this new album, a theatrical and emotional electro-pop opera where the eleven tracks, linked by a precise artistic design, showcase a skillful alternation of more reflective episodes with more explosive and danceable ones, attempting to avoid drops in performance tension, as well as in listener's attention. Finally, it's worth noting the high level Lorde has reached as a lyricist, author of undoubtedly accessible yet somehow oblique, vaguely hallucinatory, and at times "cursed" lyrics, making her an exception and an excellence among contemporary pop stars.

Melodrama is not so much a display of greater personality, a quality that Lorde has never lacked, but rather an important step towards full artistic and creative freedom, towards the total expression of herself. It is still a work destined to sell, resulting from significant artistic and economic investments, yet it represents an experiment that is courageous in its own way, dissonant from the rest of mainstream pop. After all, we are talking about a musician with unexpected tastes (Graceland by Paul Simon has been cited as a significant influence on this work) and close to the best of "alt" songwriting (in 2014 she covered "Ladder Song" by Bright Eyes); it is perhaps natural, then, that Lorde's music presents itself as a mediation between the two trends, the popular and the alternative, a possible meeting point between the shamelessly catchy pop of the latest Taylor Swift and the melodrama, the true and sick one, of FKA Twigs.

And so, while it's true that several songs adhere to the same formula, the slightly detrimental one in the long run that involves an ascending climax leading to an explosive central motive, Melodrama nevertheless showcases a series of demonstrations of how clear and unique Lorde's pop talent is. The grandeur of some melodies, first of all, not only in the deadly "Green Light", but also in tracks like "Homemade Dynamite", limping and sensual, and "Perfect Places", elegant and determined. The sharpness and poetry of the lyrics previously mentioned shine in the above-mentioned songs, as well as in the piano-voice "Liability" and especially in its dream-pop reworking "Liability (reprise)", both dealing with the theme of solitude, the unfortunate second side of success. The arrangements of the pieces are dynamic, dark, alluring, and are at their best in "Hard Feelings / Loveless", the best song on the album, an intense dance-pop suite alternating gospel electro-soul choirs, drone synths, and sweet melodies. In all the songs, the theme - dominant in the concept of the album - of the party as a moment of escape emerges, an occasion to flee towards the “perfect places” that give the name to the closing track. But “where the fuck are perfect places, anyway?” the New Zealander sings doubtfully; the album ends, the search for the answer is up to us.

In conclusion, Melodrama is certainly the album of a now privileged artist, who has already made it and is continuously supported by those who work to keep her at the top of stardom; this doesn’t mean, however, it is a predictable work, but rather it represents an inspired work full of interesting suggestions, capable of appealing to a wide and diverse audience. Lorde may probably not be the future of music as someone prophesied, but she is undoubtedly a musician to watch and in whom we place our hopes for a consistently high-level career.