And thatΓÇÖs a crucial subtlety: "Royals" doesn't critique hip-hop culture so much as express a disconnect that many of the people who love it (Lorde included: "I've always listened to a lot of rap") feel when listening to songs about luxury culture. Lorde says she wrote it thinking of how she and her friends would listen to A$AP Rocky rapping about couture while they rummaged through a particular friends' well-stocked kitchen, too broke (or too lazy) to spend money on dinner. The arrangement is economicalΓÇöjust a few finger snaps and a barely-there beat caught in the gravitational pull of Lorde's charismaΓÇöbut overall, "Royals" gets to have it both ways. "Royals" walks the line between rebelling against and reveling in the trappings of power, luxury, and excess of contemporary pop. That carefully cultivated ambiguity is precisely what makes Pure Heroine work. Or is she saying "revelled"? It's hard to tell the two words apart, and maybe that's the point. "I'm kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care," she sings with a languid sigh on the bleacher-stomping single "Team". Her songs capture the drama and debauched regality of being a teenager: their subjects include online gossip, empty bottles, queen bees, and young people who already feel old. Lorde's voice occasionally takes the form of a wide-eyed, Feist-y coo, but much more often it's a low, clenched growl like everything else about her, it has an air of "wise beyond her years." "I didn't start writing songs until I was 13," she said in a recent interview, almost apologetically, but then quickly accounted for the lost time, "Before that, I wrote short fiction." Now that she's a wizened 16, Lorde, who wrote all the lyrics on Pure Heroine and co-wrote the music, has fashioned herself a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Twenty seconds into her debut album, Pure Heroine, she's already announced that she's bored.
The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks. With the global smash "Royals" (the first song in 17 years by a female solo artist to top BillboardΓÇÖs alternative chart) she made her name by sneering at everything else on the radio ("We don't care/ We aren't caught up in your love affair"). The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift Katy Perry asked her to tour with her andΓÇöpolitely but firmlyΓÇöshe said no.
(It's an anti-video in the tradition of the Replacements' "Bastards of Young", and, fittingly, her moody cover of "Swingin Party" has been making the rounds.) In a moment when too many new artists seem afraid to offend or go off script, Lorde is an exciting contradiction: an aspiring pop star who's had a major-label development deal since age 12 (she was discovered at a local talent show) but has retained a seemingly genuine iconoclastic streak. That's the message you get from the defiantly low-concept video for her single "Tennis Court", in which the 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter (real name: Ella Yelich-O'Connor) stares right at youΓÇöher taunting, onyx pupils burning a hole through the computer screenΓÇöfor a hypnotic and somewhat uncomfortable three and a half minutes. In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole.
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