Lorde

Melodrama

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.

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.

Melodrama delivers everything pop music should, but yet it manages to find more. As an album it is unlikely to be bettered in 2017.

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.

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.

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.

It is a brilliantly well-crafted electro-acoustic, synth drenched exploration of the internal factory of emotion - a 21st century masterpiece.

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.

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.

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.

Confused, unsettled and ultimately optimistic – Melodrama is the smartest pop record of the year so far.

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.

This resulting work is hefty enough to tick industry boxes, and just weird enough to intrigue; a qualified success.

Melodrama is rightly earning raves, and will go down as one of the better pop albums of the decade.

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.

At its broken heart, Melodrama is what a breakup sounds like. With all the heartache, laments, moments of melancholy and hopes of moving on intact. Growing pains and strains. Life, love and stains. At once a partner to—and antidote for—loneliness, it is a strong outing for an artist still embracing her creative journey.

Her self-perceptive wryness, tinged with introversion, is still apparent, but Melodrama seems to glide in on a cool wave of self-assurance. Where her 16-year-old self was unsure, sardonic or chaotic, here she finds a balance between revealing some parts of herself and covering up others.

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.

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.