I’ve been meaning to write about ‘Ribs’ for a while now. So naturally I downloaded it and found myself loving it more and more with each listen. If you still are hesitant (aka pressed, crazy, anti-New Zealand, ect.) than you should at least check out ‘Ribs’.īack in October ‘Ribs’ was featured as the iTunes single of the week giving the general public a taste of the 17 years old beyond ‘Royals’. Just as she declared on ‘Royals’: she craved a different kind of buzz, and she made us crave that buzz, too.I should get this out of the way first: if you haven’t listened to Lorde’s Pure Heroine album yet you need to dust off your keyboard and purchase it right now. It’s hard to imagine, say, Billie Eilishwithout Lorde. Most importantly, however, Lorde and Pure Heroine’s success paved the way for other young women in pop to present alternative, outsider personas – ones that weren’t sexual or provocative. Vocalists, too, would start to shy away from belting their words, favoring a quieter and more melodic approach. In the years that followed the album’s release, pop producers would cut back on the glitz and gloss, returning to stripped-down, simpler sounds. Like The xx before her (who were very likely an influence), Lorde’s dark, minimalist sound was at odds with much of what was going on in popular music at the time: EDM bass drops, relentless dance beats, and synthetic production. Some of the biggest musicians in the world took notice: Taylor Swift became a close friend of Lorde’s Dave Grohl invited her to sing “All Apologies” at Nirvana’s induction to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame David Bowie himself called her “the future of music.” Even South Park ran a good-natured spoof of her, in the process teaching a surprisingly heartfelt lesson about gender identity (well, heartfelt for South Park, at least).īut Pure Heroine’s legacy lies in how it recalibrated the sound of pop music. It was a commercial success, too, selling four million copies worldwide. When she sings “I’ve never felt more alone/It feels so scary, getting old”, it lands as the most relatable and immediately affecting line on the entire album.Ĭritics responded favorably to Pure Heroine, with many noting Lorde’s age and the maturity and depth of her lyrics. Amid a gorgeous, blooming instrumental that sounds like it was recorded underwater, she sets the scene in vivid detail – “The drink you spilt all over me/‘Lover’s Spit’ left on repeat” – as she confesses her deep-seated fear of adulthood. And then there’s “Ribs”, the album’s highlight, which finds Lorde in a moment of clarity at a house party.
“Still Sane” catches her wondering if her new fame has changed her – and if not if, then when – while the tropical-music-influenced “Buzzcut Season” seeks an escape from all the tragedy and suffering in the world. This also extends to the music video for “Tennis Court,” which consists of an unbroken shot of Lorde staring unsettlingly into the camera and mouthing the occasional “yeah.”īut some of Pure Heroine’s best moments come when Lorde just lets herself be a teenager.
As with “Royals,” these are pop songs that play like critiques of pop songs, and they push back against the mainstream and its expectations of a young pop artist. Lorde’s depictions of teenage indifference and celebrity culture, respectively, grow darker (in both sound and lyrics) on “Team” and “Glory And Gore,” the latter of which imagines the public arena as a literal arena for entertainers to duel like gladiators. Lorde’s first words on the album try to convey a sense of detachment she says she’s bored, twice, but her self-consciousness starts to show in the next verse as she asks, “How can I f_k with the fun again when I’m known?” It’s a perfect opening track to Pure Heroine: a jaded commentary on her burgeoning stardom over an empty electronic beat. “Tennis Court” was one of the first songs that Lorde and Little wrote during these sessions.