Lorde
"Melodrama"
(Republic/Lava (ASTERISK)(ASTERISK)(ASTERISK))
Being wise beyond your years gets old before you know it, Lorde finds out on "Melodrama." The New Zealand songwriter was 16 in 2013 when she took the charts by surprise with "Royals," a song that signaled that she was an uncommonly accomplished teenage craftswoman not the least bit interested in the accoutrements of commercial success. "Gold teeth, Grey Goose ... ball gowns, trashin' the hotel room": the singer born Ella Yelich-O'Connor was having none of it.
Four years later, and Lorde is now a celebrity megastar finally releasing a follow-up album that announces itself as autobiographical and that often makes the emotional cost of too many nights on the town its subject. Working with producer Jack Antonoff of Bleachers (and, yes, Lena Dunham's boyfriend) the now-20-year-old songwriter's task on this breakup album that mixes electro-beat euphoria and self-examination is not to prove she's an artist of depth. She did that already. Instead, it's to maintain a credible outsider's perspective while still coming up with catchy, alienated songs that move in the disorienting grown-up world of strange bedrooms and broken hearts. Lorde uses those experiences, and other emotional torments, to continue to make compelling alt-pop.
_Dan DeLuca
