Melodrama Review
If pieces of music, like art, were to be enshrined in public places for conservation and appreciation by the masses, then Lorde’s sophomore studio album, Melodrama, would belong in Paris amongst the oeuvres of Monet, Degas, and Van Gogh. With her second major release, Lorde proves herself as not only a songwriter, but as a painter, who––like these great impressionists––clearly possesses a talent for bringing the canvas to life.
Resembling the rich imagery of its cover, the light dancing across Lorde’s smoldering face as she lays shrouded in layers of color, the album itself consists of an array of flushed moments painted in bold strokes of throbbing pop beats and sprawling instrumentals. Ripe with emotion, Melodrama seems to careen between feelings of reckless joy and thick melancholy. Ironically, it is this characteristic chaos that builds a sense of cohesiveness, the whole album evoking the feeling of a wild night out, with all the excitement, drunken euphoria, and noise of the party but also the requisite loneliness and angst left behind when the music fades. As Lorde herself explains: “Songs exist in abstract incarnations of what the idea of a party means. A party can be literal, but it can also be something emotional.” (Lansky).
These striking themes make themselves immediately apparent in the billowing record opener “Green Light,” which represents a search for new beginnings despite the lingering bitterness of a failed relationship. As the tempo picks up and Lorde revels in the “brand new sounds/ in [her] mind,” it becomes difficult not to get swept up in her hope for new possibilities, fluorescent as the green lights she’s chasing. However, if one word could be used to describe these electrifying highs of the album, it would be fleeting.
Just as impressionist painters sought to capture the transience of the present, Lorde infuses her music with a sense of fluidity and motion. This quality comes through especially on “Supercut,” a pop anthem brimming with nostalgia for the wonder and enchantment of a past relationship. Vocals swirl and build in strength as the track flips through a whirlwind of cinematic moments, a constant bass thumping like a pounding heart in the background. As the song reaches its peak and the vibrancy begins to ebb, the listener is left with the hollow sensation of physically watching the memories fade away, the music continuing to die in dwindling echoes for a full minute after the vocals subside. Ultimately, only the vague aftereffect of the emotions remains, the impression of the romance lingering well beyond its expiration date.
This looming air of impermanence seems to pervade Melodrama from the violent switch from naive invincibility to ruin projected by “Homemade Dynamite” (“We'll end up painted on the road, red and chrome/ All the broken glass sparkling”) to the ominous question of “What will we do when we’re sober?” that lingers amidst the smoky instrumentals of “Sober.” Conjuring the metaphorical height of the party, these tracks celebrate the freedom of youthful impulsivity and blind exhilaration, but as Pitchfork reviewer Stacy Anderson remarks “[the] party has pills, dresses rumpled on the floor, no absence of profanity, and a sense of humor, too.” (Anderson).
Anderson alludes to Lorde’s ability to express the luminosity of youth without glossing over the messiness and chaos. Even in arguably one of the album’s most light-hearted songs, “The Louvre,” a honeyed depiction of the dazed excitement of falling in love, Lorde raises the stakes, asking “Can you hear the violence?” with each swelling chorus. Whether recognizing the self-destructive nature of her extreme means of thrill-seeking or the “violence” of her infatuation, Lorde’s unabashed self-awareness steeps Melodrama in a degree of authenticity and immediacy scarcely found in other pop music.
Battered by her first heartbreak and on the cusp of leaving her teenage years behind, at nineteen, Lorde has inevitably matured from the sixteen-year-old girl who wrote and recorded her first album, Pure Heroine–– and it shows. In another comment to Sam Lansky, she explains that “This time I was thrust into the soup of what I was doing. I couldn’t be detached or cool anymore” (Lansky). Lorde gives her fans a glimpse of what lies behind closed doors, and from personal experience, it’s hard to be “cool” about it.
When the party has died down and there is no music to drown out the voice in her head aside from the pared down piano notes of “Liability,” the self-effacing girl that emerges appears a far cry from the one “blowing shit up with homemade dynamite” in the beginning of the record. Inviting us to peer inside her living room, Lorde may be “swaying alone” but in her bleeding vulnerability, she is every young person who has loved “a little [too] much.” Hints of insecurity and shifting identity pepper the album, but as Lorde masterfully illustrates, these extremes are romantic until “every perfect summer’s eating [you] alive.”
Though unflinching in its portrayal of emotional turmoil and self-doubt, Melodrama is not without light. Lorde explains this complexity to Lansky, claiming that the album “is about pain, but it’s more so about joy—the process of discovering joy and reclaiming joy. Like crying and dancing in equal parts.” (Lansky). We see hints of this duality in the thick of the somber violin and desperate lilting vocals of “Writer in The Dark” where Lorde, while enduring the solitude of her lover’s absence, realizes that “I care for myself the way I used to care about you.” These sparks of optimism and self-love amongst the tumultuous backdrop of the album represent steps in this “process of discovering joy” that Lorde refers to, but never one to sugarcoat, she does not pretend that the journey is over––or promise that it ever will be.
Even in face of her extreme comedowns from love and wild thrills, Lorde stands renewed in her pursuit of life’s highs or “Perfect Places” as the closing track’s title implies. Ending with the resounding question of “What the fuck are perfect places anyway?,” Lorde leaves listeners no less assured that a destination exists. Instead, she celebrates the beauty in the blind possibility of it all.
Melodrama is not merely an album about heartbreak. An ode to youth, it celebrates the reckless courage it takes to continue to search for joy and love despite the prospect of pain. From all the glorified excess of the album’s highs and lows, Lorde shows us that when faced with feeling nothing or feeling everything, she pops the champagne, kicks off her shoes, and decides: “I guess we're partying.”
Works Cited
Anderson, Stacey. Review of Melodrama Lorde, Review of Album Pitchfork, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lorde-melodrama/ Accessed 30 Nov. 2022. .
Lanksy, Sam. “Lorde: New Album 'Melodrama,' Green Light Interview.” Time, Time, 2022, https://time.com/lorde/.