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CRITIC REVIEWS
100
Melodrama's acceptance of taking what you can get while never failing to reach for the stars makes it one of the smartest pop records of the decade.
100
Just when you think you’re nearing the end of Lorde’s journey, her words pull you back in for another listen. It’s a puzzle that’ll keep you busy long after the party is over.
100
It’s a rudely excellent album, introspective without ever being indulgent, OTT in all the right ways, honest and brave, full of brilliant songs with lyrics to chew over for months.
100
Self-care has allowed Lorde to make something extraordinary and authentic, something that takes you by the hand and assures you that you can survive and thrive in the same sea of emotion.
100
On Melodrama, Lorde invites all of us to join in her anguished party of the damned, convincing her believers that if we just keep on dancing the ills of the world won’t be able to catch up to us. And for now, that is a faith promising enough to get totally lost in.
100
What Melodrama confirms most of all is Lorde’s uncanny ability to drill down so precisely on grand emotional themes that would fell lesser songwriters. Tackling a bad breakup certainly isn’t new in pop music, but it’s delivered here with an honesty an energy that is uniquely her own.
100
Melodrama overwhelms me. It reaches me at that weird and fragile center. The part of me I consider irreconcilable.
100
Here is an original, emotional, intellectual, imaginatively audacious singer-songwriter operating at the highest artistic level yet putting it across as easy-access modern mainstream pop. Melodrama deserves to be a blockbuster.
100
‘Melodrama’ is quite probably the album of the year.
95
Lorde is an artist truly reborn on this record, bigger and more club-ready than ever in her loud beats and more forward-moving sound ... Showing she’s matured as an artist and more importantly as a person, Lorde hasn’t let her fame affect her sharp wit or cynicism in the slightest.
90
Whether it's a party record disguised as a breakup album or a breakup album disguised as a party record, it's cathartic, dramatic, and everything else you could want an album titled Melodrama to be.
90
A bold and colorful magnum opus that marks an almost unbeatable personal milestone for Lorde.
90
She seeks to articulate the unbearable emotional heaviness of being on the brink of adulthood, and of all the yearning, identity crises and self-examination that that entails. That she manages it with sincerity despite her status as an established global pop star success story, with triumphalism despite being so audibly let down by the reality, and with authority despite still not having completed the journey herself is what makes ‘Melodrama’ such a compelling experience.
90
Lorde is masterful at making music that digs within the deepest recesses of your heart and brings to the surface the feelings that you thought you'd forgotten about. Melodrama is the perfect outlet to hash (and dance) those emotions out to.
90
Melodrama delivers everything pop music should, but yet it manages to find more. As an album it is unlikely to be bettered in 2017.
90
Melodrama finds Lorde producing the best work of her career so far, crafting an ambitious and uncompromising pop statement suffused with intensely personal artistry. Both jubilant and frightened, insecure and proud, the album establishes her as a pop star on her terms.
90
Melodrama isn't strictly about inebriation. It's about growing up and growing out of love, where the excitement of a relationship fades and what's left can't sustain itself. This album explores this segment of adulthood in all its joy, despair, confusion and revelry. And it does it with stunning introspection and musical freshness.
90
It’s a soundtrack for the delirious highs and also the sobering, sombre lows when the glasses break and the lights turn on.
90
She is intensely self-aware and, accordingly, is able to take all the inelegancies of youth – the stumbles out of nightclub doors, the clothes strewn across the bedroom floor, how apocalyptic that first heartbreak feels – and turn them into something exquisite.
90
Using a loose thematic through line of a house party over the course of a single night, Melodrama covers a wide range of intense emotions without ever once falling victim to, well, melodrama.
89
It is a brilliantly well-crafted electro-acoustic, synth drenched exploration of the internal factory of emotion - a 21st century masterpiece.
88
Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom.
85
Melodrama's swirls of strings and bursts of glimmering synths show a pop star in her prime. Between rage, elation, and all of the mistakes in-between, Lorde is more self-aware than she's ever been.
85
She’s reasserted her status as today’s ultimate alt-pop artist with a record that balances the contemporary with the classic in typically immaculate style.
83
The 11-song album is more “drama” in the screenplay sense than anything else, probably because as Frank Ocean is for R&B, Lorde aspires to be pop’s poet laureate more than anything else.
80
Fuelled by a black humour that’s almost become her trademark, there’s heartbreak and ecstasy, desire, fear, uncertainty, acting on impulse, making mistakes and (maybe) learning from them. And those are tunes we can definitely dance to.
80
This balance between discovery and reflection gives Melodrama a tension, but the addition of genuine, giddy pleasure ... isn't merely a progression for Lorde, it's what gives the album multiple dimensions.
80
For all its odd misfires, it makes a great deal of the stuff that sits alongside it in the charts look pretty feeble by comparison. If that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t meant to be: if it was easy to make hugely successful mainstream pop music as smart as this, then everybody would be at it. And they patently aren’t.
80
She has said the album's conceit is a house party and its unfolding dramas; indeed, Pure Heroine's cool snark is now a hotter passion, in its millennial-skeptical way.
80
Confused, unsettled and ultimately optimistic – Melodrama is the smartest pop record of the year so far.
80
Melodrama is overblown sensationalism, and the sound of exposing every single thing without flinching. Every dark thought, every secret hope, every lurking fear, all soundtracked by uncompromising pop maximalism.
80
This resulting work is hefty enough to tick industry boxes, and just weird enough to intrigue; a qualified success.
80
Melodrama is rightly earning raves, and will go down as one of the better pop albums of the decade.
80
In an age of army-sized writing teams crushing any sense of person on most major label releases, Lorde exists as a disarmingly legitimate personality.
75
Where Pure Heroine was her global, future-forward debut, Melodrama is the red-eyed, no-rules afterparty, where the lost and loveless go for comfort.
70
On her sophomore album Melodrama, Lorde makes a few Top 40 concessions, but shows a ton of promise with the stylistic and formal risks she does take.
This is an album I have been looking forward to for over 2 years. Each year that passed after Pure Heroine released, I became more and more nervous for what was to come. From the work on the Hunger Games soundtrack that Lorde did and her feature on Disclosure's newest album, the music that was released by the New Zealand native was spotty and inconsistent. But then she dropped Green Light, the opening track from Melodrama, earlier this year. It was a little generic and sounded like almost ... read more
This is absolutely wonderful! It sounds natural, unique and extremely pleasant. There are no words to describe how well-done this is. The production is flawless it brings new elements throughout the album, which turns it into something as huge as possible. The composition is clear, and its lyrical structure is adequate. Simply marvelous.
The concept, the aesthetic, the lyrics, the sound, what a beautiful pop album she's given us.
Fav tracks: The Louvre, Perfect Places
Fav tracks: The Louvre, Perfect Places
Original Score: 52
Recent hiring at various retail jobs has exposed me to more Lorde than ever before, giving me more time to absorb her music than I ever cared to since she first made a splash a few years ago. She's always been pretty tepid critic fodder to me, but I never had a problem with her.
Then one day last week, I really started to pay attention to "Liability," and realized just how nauseatingly false she is as a music personality. Her vocals make me twitch - faux-smokey ... read more
Recent hiring at various retail jobs has exposed me to more Lorde than ever before, giving me more time to absorb her music than I ever cared to since she first made a splash a few years ago. She's always been pretty tepid critic fodder to me, but I never had a problem with her.
Then one day last week, I really started to pay attention to "Liability," and realized just how nauseatingly false she is as a music personality. Her vocals make me twitch - faux-smokey ... read more
I'm pretty floored right now. Even though I liked all the singles preceding this album, I didn't expect this to surpass her debut simply because the sound she was going for seemed for accessible and safe. Well this album actually turns out to be more ambitious and risky than I could have ever imagined. Even though many of these tracks have a traceable dance pop influence, they take the genre even further than you might expect with many spots of rock influence and piano balladry. I was also ... read more
END OF YEAR LISTS
| #1 | / | Consequence of Sound |
| #1 | / | Cosmopolitan |
| #1 | / | Entertainment Weekly |
| #1 | / | musicOMH |
| #1 | / | NME |
| #1 | / | No Ripcord |
| #1 | / | Pretty Much Amazing |
| #1 | / | Stereogum |
| #1 | / | Thrillist |
| #1 | / | Uproxx |
| #2 | / | Baeble Music |
| #2 | / | Dork |
| #2 | / | Interview Magazine |
| #2 | / | Junkee |
| #2 | / | NZ Herald |
More Lists
MISC LISTS
Track List
- Green Light
- Sober
- Homemade Dynamite
- The Louvre
- Liability
- Hard Feelings/Loveless
- Sober II (Melodrama)
- Writer In the Dark
- Supercut
- Liability (Reprise)
- Perfect Places
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Added on: March 2, 2017
