2013 debut album from New Zealand singer/songwriter Ella Yelich-O'Connor AKA Lorde. It'd be easy to mistake Ella for a seasoned tunesmith from the American South, one who carries a heavy heart that's been ravaged by careless men over time. But in truth, Lorde recorded these songs as a 16-year old Kiwi championed by the likes of Perez Hilton and Grimes. She has a timeless knack for songcraft with a sophisticated pop savvy that most people over 30 can't find without collaboration. Lorde needs no collaborative hacks -- she writes and sings her own songs. Even when she sings in her higher vocal range about teenage politics, Lorde carries herself with the grace and poise of someone like Beth Orton.
Signed to a major label at an early age, she was groomed in the darkness of studios, the label knowing the potential they had in their singer/songwriter. She wrote on her own, then she was paired with a sympathetic producer/songwriter, live performances taking a back seat to woodshedding. If this story in the early years of the 2010s brings to mind Lana Del Rey, it's no coincidence that it also applies to New Zealand singer/songwriter Lorde, whose 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, contains all of the stylized goth foreboding of LDR's Born to Die and almost none of the louche, languid glamour. This is not a small thing. Lana Del Rey is a self-created starlet willing herself into stardom but Lorde fancies herself a poet, churning away at the darker recesses of her soul. Some of this may be due to age. Lorde, as any pre-release review or portrait helpfully illustrated, was only 16 when she wrote and recorded Pure Heroine with producer Joel Little, and an adolescent aggrievance and angst certainly underpin the songs here. Lorde favors a tragic romanticism, an all-or-nothing melodrama that Little accentuates with his alternately moody and insistent productions. Where Lana Del Rey favors a studiously detached irony, Lorde pours it all out which, in itself, may be an act: her bedsit poetry is superficially more authentic but the music is certainly more pop, both in its construction -- there are big hooks in the choruses and verses -- and in the production, which accentuates a sad shimmer where everything is beautiful and broken. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
- Format: Vinyl (black)
- Genre: Pop & Electronic
Ā ---
Tracklist
| A1 | Tennis Court |
| A2 | 400 Lux |
| A3 | Royals |
| A4 | Ribs |
| A5 | Buzzcut Season |
| B1 | Team |
| B2 | Glory And Gore |
| B3 | Still Sane |
| B4 | White Teeth Teens |
| B5 | A World Alone |
