Lorde - Solar Power

The Quietus

We live in an era of pop stars so hypermodern – so glitteringly unfathomable – they feel like characters from science fiction. Their careers play out not in the album charts or the review columns but on streaming playlists and in the comments sections beneath their Insta posts. And rather than the old imperial measurements of units shifted or concert tickets sold, their influence is calculated in algorithmic buzz and in how much of the conversational bandwidth they occupy.

Amidst this ongoing recalibration of what it is to be an artist and a celebrity, and where one ends and the other begins, the trajectory of Ella Yelich-O’Connor, AKA Lorde, feels reassuringly old fashioned. Her new album is called Solar Power but, just like the moon, Lorde is an artist with distinct phases.

Hers is a very traditional artistic progression, then, each chapter in her creative journey clearly delineated. The teenage melancholia of her 2013 debut Pure Heroine was followed the early adulthood overload of 2017’s Melodrama. And now there is Solar Power, the folk horror comedown record that reunites her with Melodrama producer Jack Antonoff and is variously influenced by Ari Aster’s Midsommar, the death of the hippy dream and devastating fragility of All Saints' 'Pure Shores'.

It’s wonderful – but with a background hum of rising dread. The tone that comes through is Laurel Canyon with just a hint of something smudging the horizon – a cloud suddenly blotting the sun perhaps, or the taste of smoke from an approaching wildfire. That gear-shift is manifested through hazy guitars and in Yelich O’Connor’s vocals, which at moments suggest Choirgirl Hotel vintage Tori Amos surrounded by scary Swedish ladies in white ceremonial garb and at others a manifestation of the vibe Taylor Swift was chasing on the Folklore cover art.

Yelich-Conor has explained that she was reading up on Sixties cults and how good intentions often paved the way to dark endings. There was always a messiah figure leading the way, too – which perhaps explains the tiniest pinprick of menace that manifests on single 'Solar Power', as she describes herself as a ''prettier Jesus''.

She doubles down on that theme of wishful thinking leading to unhappy destinations on 'Mood Ring'. It’s a satire of wellness culture – of trying fill the void in your soul with esoteric junk – but one that doesn’t land its punches so much as slither beneath the skin.

But Solar Power isn’t all blinding bright horror. 'Secrets From A Girl (Who’s Seen It All)' is a reminder from Lorde that all things will pass – heartache and post-adolescent growing pains included. The track spirals into a flourish of humour, too, as pop star Robyn delivers an ersatz cabin crew address to passengers jetting away from emotional trauma (''Welcome to sadness/The temperature is unbearable until you face it''…)

That upbeat sensibility reassesses itself on closing track 'Oceanic Feeling' – the title from a phrase coined by Freud and which he characterised as the sense of "being one with the external world as a whole"."On the beach I’m building a pyre," Lorde sings, adding that she plans to ''take of my robes and step into the choir''. As she delivers those lines you feel the sky rushing down and the earth falling away.

It’s menacing, calming, earthy and completely otherworldly. And an appropriately unnerving conclusion to a project that, for all its bruises and emotional scarring, find a way to be flawless. And which confirms Lorde as continuing to inhabit a space-time continuum entirely of her own devising.

Share this article:

Pitchfork 68

Read Anna Gaca’s review of the album.

The Guardian 0

(Universal Music New Zealand/EMI Records)
Equipped with lovely melodies and a bombast-resistant sound, the New Zealander exchanges the spotlight for a sly reflection on true happiness

Plenty of mainstream pop stars have decided they no longer want to be mainstream pop stars. They’ve tried everything to achieve their goal, from making deliberately unlistenable albums, to – in the memorable case of the late Scott Walker – locking themselves in a monastery on the Isle of Wight.

But few have attempted to bid farewell to mainstream pop stardom as prettily as Lorde does on her third album. It opens with a guitar picking a gentle, woozy-sounding figure. A flute glides beatifically by and Lorde offers a grim depiction of life as a teenager superstar – complete with “nightmares from the camera flash” – before apparently saying goodbye to all that: “alone on a windswept island”, she “won’t take the call if it’s the label or radio”. “If you’re looking for a saviour,” she adds, “that’s not me”, which would sound a little self-aggrandising had the world of online fandom not become so overheated that whenever a female pop star posts anything on social media, the responses are clogged up by stans calling them “mum”, “queen” and “goddess”.

Related: Lorde: ‘I’m not a climate activist. I’m a pop star’

The Guardian 0

(EMI)
Like Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift before her, the New Zealand star embraces mellowness on a third album shaded by climate anxiety and a rejection of celebrity

Sometimes, Solar Power – Lorde’s long-awaited third album – feels like the polar opposite of her second, 2017’s Melodrama: it is filled with calm, sun-kissed serenity. Over 12 outdoorsy but often inward-looking tracks, the 24-year-old New Zealand pop sensation seems to bid adieu to the toxic and the fraught, the garish and the busy. If the mood of the album’s title track – and its eye-catching video, in which dancers gyrate cultishly around Lorde’s “prettier Jesus” – felt tremendously beach-ready, the rest of Solar Power is dappled with late-afternoon shade. The album’s pace never really recaptures the Primal Scream vibes of the single.

But the album is not much poorer for this equanimity, with its former teen star, elevated to instant mega-fame in the 2010s, pondering past lives, present happiness and future uncertainty with some deft writing, a gauzy feel and the odd Beatles melody. The drums are a kit, not a program; there are susurrations and New York sirens lurking within the production, lending depth and breadth.

The album will not be released on CD, but as a more eco-conscious Music Box format

Related: Lorde: ‘I’m not a climate activist. I’m a pop star’