Turning twenty is a trip. Life becomes vivid and haphazard. Choices have consequences. The people around you suddenly matter. Mundanely and devastatingly, the first integer of your age changes. You consciously feel yourself become older. Your self, your being, all pouring viscously into the crevices of the person you’re becoming. A terrifying thrill.
Melodrama is about turning twenty. It tells this through the seizure of heartbreak, the decadence of hedonism in reaction, and the attempt to pull a person out of the lurid mess. It’s rich and lively and imaginative and laced with an energy that crackles. Listening to it is this wondrous delight, little details popping out at you from amid a blaze of quickfire hooks. And peering from underneath, a curious, reflective gaze, eager to transcribe the dizzying changes in and around her.
But Melodrama’s real coup is that it turns out to not be about turning twenty at all. Because picking over heartbreak and making drunken mistakes, as it happens, continues well after that. Whereas Pure Heroine was hung up on being young as an identity, contributing to a certain over precociousness on its part, Melodrama is less bothered with identifiers, merely conveying how, with edge-of-twenty hubris, feeling itself becomes heightened. For that fact, the fresh youth it captures within its iridescent stopper bottle becomes less an artefact, something to long for from a distance as you would with many a snapshot of being young. Instead, it’s something to recognise as your own. Because this is not a static glimpse of youth but a moving portrait of that point where youth acquires the unsettling weight of adulthood. And in that reality, the album somehow becomes universal.
All you’d want from an album, really, is thought. The artist extending to the listener the courtesy of really thinking about what it would sound like. Melodrama is painstakingly thought out. The tracklist is sequenced with scrupulous consideration, curated to let multiple thoughts develop organically over its runtime. The idea that the people you love never leave you, that you toy with that love over and over, trying to rationalise and to forgive and to make sense of it, long after they’ve departed. The fact that being who are you are and doing what you must can repel people as much as draw them in, even if you just want to hold onto everyone. The thought of the garish, overpowering allure of the high even as you sense its nauseous dangers well before the comedown.
These realities are telegraphed as a sequence of emotional highs, which go beyond one note. “Green Light” fashions a stomping dance romp out of post-breakup bitterness; “The Louvre” tinges the frenzied obsession over a new love with wisps of the darkness that will destroy it; and “Writer In The Dark” tries to come to terms with the terrible love you have for someone after they’ve gone. In a year when so many of her pop contemporaries have struggled with songwriting, Lorde manages to capture entire lifetimes in single lines: the defiant affirmation of I care for myself the way I used to care about you; the psychotic madness of I'll love you 'til you call the cops on me; and the gleaming despair of in my head, in my head I do everything right. Two albums in, she has mastered economic songwriting to an art, with devastating results.
It sounds fantastic, of course. Leeching some of the year’s best production off Jack Antonoff and Frank Dukes, she fashions it for herself as textured, detailed pop that feels alive. It’s comfortable enough to please and different enough to intrigue, as committed to exploding sound – with unexpected blares of brass, guitar licks and strings – as it is to denuding it – with desolate, mournful balladry. Throughout, her now distinctly verdant voice mourns, dejects, coos and snarls with head-on-neck intimacy.
Oh, and it’s clever. “The Louvre” boasts the understated brilliance of I overthink your punctuation use/Not my fault, just a thing that my mind do. Elsewhere, she mouths explosions and feigns pen clicks, and broadcasts the boom boom boom boom. What might have come off as precious before is now this knowing levity. Even when the album finally indulges its youth on the taunting sing-song coda of “Loveless”, it’s with a tongue firmly in cheek. A parody of what millennial culture is assumed to be with mocking bite. To top it off, iconcism delivered with casual wit: Down the back, but who cares, still the Louvre. Frequently, it is a game to her, played eyes half-closed.
Part of it, too, are the structural plays which charge the coils in the album with electricity. “Sober” revels in heady intoxication just as its counterpart, “Sober II (Melodrama)”, charts the sickly descent with barely concealed self-disgust. “Liability” converts a monologue to herself about the burden she is to those around her to a reprise where she is overwhelmed by that. The songwriting follows through with continuities: I'm acting like I don't see every ribbon you used to tie yourself to me in “Sober” frays to These ribbons wrap me up in “Supercut”. The production trails back. The house piano line that ignites “Green Light” is a backing refrain in “Supercut”. Judicious chords which suddenly leaven energetic, bouncy proceedings with unexpected poignancy, like those endings to “The Louvre” and “Perfect Places”; merciless jabs at the jugular. These all appear effortless, masking the meticulous construction of the whole affair.
Most strikingly, the album throws up moments of tantalising suggestion before pulling away in unexpected directions. She could have tacked a final chorus onto “Sober” instead of ending, improbably, with a bridge. She could have left out the skipped beats and oddly spaced silences throughout. She could have committed to making the finale of “Supercut” properly explosive – the in the moments, in the dark backing line of the final chorus extended out to render a destructive banger – instead of plunging the song underwater for an entire minute and a half. And she could have made more explicit its Concept Album conceit – evidently tracking a night through a house party – by sprinkling through more signifiers instead of merely throwing up individual moments. But these, in their luminous abstraction, still conjure a sequence of images – of mixing drinks in mugs by the sink, steadying yourself against walls, having fingers run through your hair, stumbling into taxis and out of clubs, hands clutching hands, and looking skywards elatedly to catch the city lights.
Ultimately, these paths she takes amount to a supreme show of steely, almost arrogant confidence. They are invariably more interesting and bold precisely for what they aren’t as much as what they are. In between all these lines, real and imagined, a woman observing herself and the world around her with such clear-eyed candour. Fascinated and consumed by what she’s becoming, with the skill to transmit exactly what she sees and the humility to do so with considerate humour. All the more arresting because the prospect of what is to come next is thrilling. Talent, then. At twenty.
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Auckland’s North Shore is separated from the city centre by Waitemata Harbour. For those without a car, the only way to cross its expanse is by ferry. Every Friday and Saturday night, the night ferries ship hordes of twenty year olds into the city. As the near-decrepit vessels bounce over the waves, the longline shirted and the skinny jeaned guzzle the cheap, shit wine they’ve snuck in or the overpriced, shit beer sold onboard. Dazed, they imagine the impending light up floors under their feet and the taste of tequila and lime on their tongues and the touch of warm skin on their fingers. Steadily, the city – you'll never see onscreen, not very pretty – draws nearer, its mild and fluorescent lights reflecting on the placid waters. Black and cobalt, flecked with gold. Looking over it, steadying yourself against the handrails, catching the sea spray and the cold breeze, tipsy drunk high, everything lies ahead of you. The city, the night, your twenties, your life. And you’re awash with possibility.
This is no longer Lorde’s life, nor mine for that matter. She’s letting the seasons change her mind, while I now make do without seasons at all. But it turns out that taste of possibility is more lasting than all of the things you’re taking. That the mid-water flash of colours and gusts and fluttering thoughts somehow has permanence. That the heartache and despair and fury and blinding madness will course through your life, as will the euphoria and revelation and hope and all-too-rare peace you’ll somehow extract from life’s irresolute banality. And you try and hold onto it.
