FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Lorde - Solar Power
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FOR this Revisiting…
PHOTO CREDIT: Ophelia Mikkelson Jones
I am coming to an album that was given mixed reviews when it came out. Lorde’s third studio album, Solar Power, was released on 20th August, 2021. Lorde wrote and produced the album with Jack Antonoff, with whom she also worked on her 2017 studio album, Melodrama. An album that went to number one in several countries and hit number two here in the U.K., the third album from the New Zealand-born Ella Yelich-O'Connor is phenomenal. I saw a lot of two and three-star reviews, but there were also some hugely positive ones. It split critics quite a bit as good as Melodrama, it does come close! I think that Solar Power was given a bit of an unfair shake in 2021. Listening now, and it is an album that keeps reveal layers and wonderful moments. Prior to getting to some positive reviews for Solar Power, I want to source a couple of interviews. With songs written by Yelich-O'Connor (she credited herself as Lorde when it came to production) and Antonoff, Solar Power is this incredible album that will stay with you. In August 2021, The New York Times featured Lorde. Stating here was someone who achieved hits as a teen and is now chasing the sun, Solar Power seems like Lorde’s most important work to date:
“It’s not even that the singer and songwriter born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, now 24, presents as especially perfect, or self-assured or immune to criticism. It’s not that she doesn’t suffer from second-guessing, insecurities, bouts of vanity, impatience or mindless cellphone scrolling.
But Lorde — the human and the artist — can usually be found one step ahead, intuitively and emotionally, having thought through her reality from most angles: how something felt to her, how she might express that, how it will be received and how she might process how she was interpreted. This is a skill set that many people who become known like she did — as a gifted small-town teenager with an out-of-the-gate smash success — can feign pretty well. But few do it as convincingly.
“I know enough to know that people in my position are symbols and archetypes and where we meet people, in the context of culture and current events, is sort of outside of our control, so I try not to fret too much,” Lorde said recently, with characteristic consideration and Zen, ahead of the release of her third album.
“It’s a very funny position to be in,” she acknowledged. “It’s absurd.”
But it’s this sense of perspective and self-awareness that has kept Lorde going in an often unforgiving industry. In fact, she made an entire album about finding balance.
“Solar Power,” out Aug. 20, is what happens when a pop star outwits the system, swerves around its strange demands, stops trying to make hits and decides to whisper to her most devoted followers how she did it. For Lorde, the trick was having a life — a real life — far away from all of this. And also throwing her phone into the ocean. (A therapist didn’t hurt either.)
After the reign of “Royals,” her first single — which spent nine weeks at No. 1 and won two Grammys — and her three-times platinum 2013 debut “Pure Heroine,” Lorde took four years to release a follow-up. Her second album, “Melodrama,” in 2017, paled in comparison commercially, but it realigned out-of-whack expectations, establishing the singer as a phenom-turned-auteur, earning her rave reviews and another Grammy nomination, this time for album of the year. Then she hoarded four more years for herself.
Along the way, Lorde became an industry blueprint for a sort of world-building, precocious wallflower singer-songwriter, helping to usher in a generation including Halsey, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. But Lorde hasn’t really stuck around to see it.
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“I went back to living my life,” she said of her recent hiatus, identifying as “a hothouse flower, a delicate person and a massive introvert,” drained after a year-plus of promotion and touring for “Melodrama.” “It’s hard for people to understand that.”
“The question I’ve gotten a lot recently is, ‘What have you been doing?’” she added. “I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, no — this is a break from my life.’ I come back and perform these duties because I believe in the album”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Justin J Wee for The New York Times
I want to move on to NME. An artist hugely admired around the world, there was a lot of attention and press around Solar Power. NME noted how there is a singularity to the album. It is a hugely intriguing and nuanced album that does unfold over time. Maybe many critics need to revisit it and approach with fresh ears:
“Aside from Lorde herself, the biggest character on ‘Solar Power’ is our planet. The album is a celebration of the natural world, from the musician’s insistence that we should “hope the sun will show us the path” on album opener ‘The Path’ to ‘Fallen Fruit’’s disappointment in past generations leaving today’s youth to deal with the climate crisis. Even the sounds on the record reflect the nature she was so inspired by, her beloved 808 drums and synths – which made 2013 debut ‘Pure Heroine’ and its 2017 follow-up ‘Melodrama’ so compelling – replaced by acoustic guitar and analogue drums.
“There’s some statistics about electronic music being more likely to be made in cities or urban environments and the opposite is more likely to be made in open pastures,” she says. “I think that makes sense based on my experience. ‘Melodrama’ was very much made in a city and also for a different time of day. I think when you’re trying to bust the 808s out to represent the golden hour…” She trails off, laughing at the idea.
‘Solar Power’ is a singular record in 2021’s musical landscape. It has elements of the Laurel Canyon folk influence that you can hear in record’s such as Clairo’s ‘Sling’ (the gen-Z star also provides backing vocals on several tracks) or Birdy’s ‘Young Heart’, but the way Yelich-O’Connor marries that with other influences – referencing Primal Scream, Natalie Imbruglia and, brilliantly, S Club 7 and Robbie Williams on the title track alone – pulls it into its own unique space of sunkissed folk-pop that feels like its sprouted from the soil itself.
“I guess that was part of why I stepped back from consuming the internet in a really consistent way – I wanted to know what I would make when I wasn’t dialled into what everyone else was making,” she theorises. Lorde has gone mostly off-grid – she’s locked out of her social media accounts, has blocked Google on her phone and YouTube on her laptop, and made her phone grayscale to try and pull herself out of a digital addiction. “One of the things that starts to happen when you have any sort of community is you start to move as one, in a way. I honestly don’t think I could have achieved this if I tried four years ago, just because [I was in] the whirlpool.”
“I was like, ‘Is this all I can do? Is this the sum of my parts, being an entertainer?’”
In the past, the 24-year-old says, she would have been drawn into trying to make her own version of what she saw other people doing. “I would even just see someone wear something and I’d be like, ‘I really need to get that, that’s what we’re wearing now’,” she says, laughing. Divorcing herself from being so in touch with the cultural zeitgeist allowed her to put the focus back on herself and follow her instincts.
For each of her albums, Lorde has undergone a big personal transformation. Records, for her, are ways to unpack the events and relationships in her life. In the four years between ‘Melodrama’ and ‘Solar Power’, she says “so much” has changed, particularly in the way she’s reset her relationship with fame and the by-products of it. Rather than view her pop star existence as her “normal” life and her time at home as a holiday, she sees it as being very much the other way around.
“For someone like me, there’s a lot of fractals,” she begins. “There’s me in my house with my loved ones; my neighbours who know me to be a famous person; people in my country who know me to be a famous person; people in other countries who know me to be a famous person. It takes a second to figure out what your relationship is going to be.” To work that out for herself, she says, she needed to tap out and sink into a more domestic life at home – one where she gives herself weeks at a time off work, living in a very “luxuriously unstructured” way until she feels the itch to get back in the studio”.
I want to bring in a review from Rolling Stone. They had plenty of praise and positive points when it came to the incredible Solar Power. I think that it ranks alongside the best albums of 2021. If you have not heard the album, then make sure that you rectify that:
“Nothing moves up a quarter-life crisis quite like a global climate catastrophe and a pandemic, so Lorde’s is right on time. With Solar Power, she’s right in the thick of it: wearied by teenage fame and capitalism, worried about the state of the earth and grieving the loss of her beloved dog Pearl. To abate the bubbling undercurrent of grief and stress, she escapes to the beachside resort in her mind. It’s the dawn of a new Lorde — dare we say, in her Margaritaville era? — trying to channel her inner chill to mixed results.
The title track led off Lorde’s album cycle, a Jack Johnson-y slice of commercial sunshine pop that embraced some of the lush harmonies of her previous two albums but pivoted far away from the underlying darkness. The rest of Solar Power has the same approach in mind: Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers fill out the background vocals on a mix of Laurel Canyon-esque acoustic cuts and serene ballads. As she promises on “Oceanic Feeling,” her “cherry-black lipstick’s gathering dust in a drawer/I don’t need her anymore.
Lorde spends a lot of the album shedding her skin. Phones get tossed in the water. She bids adieu to “all the bottles, all the models” and “the kids in line for the new Supreme.” The music she loved when she was sixteen gets left back in New Zealand, probably collecting dust next to the lipstick. She essentially Gone Girl’s herself from her past, taking a sparse few memories with her, like the one of Carole King presenting her with a Grammy Award on “California.” But even her relationship with her own music is fraught: “I thought I was a genius/But now I’m 22, and it’s starting to feel like all I know how to do is put on a suit and take it away/With my fistful of tunes that it’s painful to play,” she admits “The Man With the the Axe.” The ballad itself is a bit sleepy; while there is ambient emotional tension threaded through the album, that doesn’t always translate to the way a song sounds, leaving some of those reflections feeling more whimsical than they probably should.
Meanwhile, those glimpses into her early twenties psyche don’t mesh and often complicate the more satirical moments. “Mood Ring,” which is sonically a highlight and lyrically a miss, is one of the more obvious satires, tackling wellness culture through the lens of Sixties commune life. While a valiant attempt, what it misses is that one of the best parts of Lorde’s songwriting is her incredible earnestness. When that is let loose, like on the absolutely stellar “Oceanic Feeling” and Big Star-esque “Big Star,” she is an unstoppable pop force.
Solar Power largely meanders through the anxiety, a bit of a relatable smooth brain approach to all that’s going on in the world. Lorde admits as much on the album: she basks in the inconclusiveness of her deep thoughts. Even Robyn, who appears at the end of “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All)” as a flight attendant on Strange Airlines, destination Sadness (quite literally) is not even sure where the tour will take you. (And though always pleasant to see Robyn, imagine the type of sweeping dance floor monster the pair could’ve made in a different part of Lorde’s musical journey!)
The timing of the songwriter’s most inward album yet is a bit funny: we are seeing the impact of her first two albums absolutely dominate popular music. Her influence has left an indelible mark on the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and even Billie EIlish, both of whom hit the same notes on how taxing celebrity can be before they even hit their twenties. We are hearing a version of Lorde everywhere nowadays, but Lorde herself can’t hear any of it with all those seashells pressed to her ears, listening deep for the sounds of crashing waves in the distance. She’s figuring out her life in real time, chipping away at who she is and who she could be through her music. And has enlightenment been found? No, she professes, but she’s trying”.
I am going to finish with a review from NME. Awarding thew album five stars, Rhian Daly was stunned and blown away by an artist who has released three stunning albums in a row. I am curious to see what album number four might offer:
“On her previous two albums, Lorde made modern classics. ‘Pure Heroine’ surveyed the life of teenagers in 2013, bored and over the typical milestones of what we’re told success is, too busy drifting around the suburbs in friends’ cars to care about the trappings of luxury. Four years later, on ‘Melodrama’, she took us into one night at a house party and the dissolution of a relationship, deftly capturing every angle of a break-up.
For her third album, the Kiwi star is bringing things back to our most basic level – paying tribute to nature and the Earth itself. “The beginning of summer is my favourite time in New Zealand, and this year in particular it feels like a gift,” she shared with fans in a round-robin email last year, before ‘Solar Power’ was announced. The first piece of material she previewed from the record – its title track – captured that feeling perfectly. “I hate the winter / Can’t stand the cold,” the 24-year-old sings. “But when the heat comes/ Something takes a hold.”
Lorde revels in the environment throughout the album, whether she’s suggesting jumping off Bulli Point on her home country’s Lake Taupō on album closer ‘Oceanic Feeling’ or looking to the skies for answers on ‘The Path’. “Now if you’re looking for a saviour – wellm that’s not me,” she tells us on the latter, dark and moody flute melodies floating beneath her. “Let’s hope the sun will show us the path.”
While ‘Solar Power’ draws its potency from Mother Nature, its creator doesn’t sugarcoat the reality that the natural world, which is so inspiring to her, is in danger of irreversible change. “Wearing SPF 3000 for the ultraviolet rays,” she sings on ‘Leader Of A New Regime’, a stripped-back island escape that makes hermitting yourself away from the chaos of daily life sound like a dream (“Got a trunkful of Simone and Céline and of course my magazines / I’m gonna live out my days”). ‘Fallen Fruit’ takes on the generations that came before us, condemning them, over unsettling folk music, for leaving “us dancing on the fallen fruit”. She asks: “How can I love what I know I am gonna lose?”
‘Solar Power’ reflects Lorde pulling from Earth not just lyrically, but musically too. Where ‘Pure Heroine’ and ‘Melodrama’ were filled with euphoric synths and crisp digital sounds, this album peels away all our technological advances and relies on more organic sounds. Even when swathes of mellotron or Wurlitzer coat the tracks, as on ‘Fallen Fruit’ or ‘Secrets From A Girl (Who’s Seen It All)’, they do so in a way that feels like they’ve been pulled from the soil rather than coursing with electricity.
Elsewhere, the record deals with grief – not for the climate especially, but for Lorde’s dog Pearl, whose death in 2019 delayed this release. “‘Member what you thought was grief before you got the call?” Lorde asks herself on ‘Secrets…’ and, later, Swedish alt-pop don Robyn dials into the track for a spoken word verse that tells us: “Welcome to sadness / The temperature is unbearable until you face it.” It’s a gentle, generous song that softly urges Lorde to keep going and get through her pain, nudging her to trust in her instincts and believe in the answers she holds inside herself.
Pearl pops up again on the reverent ‘Big Star’, which pays tribute to the pure, non-judgmental relationship between pet and owner. “I’m a cheater – I lie and I’m shy / But you like to say hello to total strangers,” Lorde murmurs on its first verse, summing up her late dog’s accepting nature, which is at odds with humans’ flaws. “You’re a big star,” she adds fondly. “Want to take your picture / ‘Til I die.”
To counter ‘Solar Power’’s worship of our planet and its creatures, ‘Mood Ring’ offers a tongue-in-cheek look at wellness culture. Dropping references to yoga positions and crystals, the track depicts relying on the titular jewellery to know how you’re doing. “I can’t feel a thing,” Lorde sighs. “I keep looking at my mood ring / Tell me how I’m feeling.” The subtly amusing lyrics also find her noting: “Can’t seem to fix my mood / Today it’s as dark as my roots.”
There are comments on ageing too; on ‘Secrets’, the 24-year-old laments how quickly her last decade has slipped by, and the gorgeous ‘Stoned At The Nail Salon’ sees her meditate on growing up. “All the beautiful girls, they will fade like the roses,” Lorde notes, later adding: “All the music you loved at 16, you’ll grow out of.”
‘Solar Power’, though, doesn’t feel like a record that will suffer that same fate – this is an album that grows in quiet stature with every listen, new nuggets of wisdom making their way to the surface, peeking through its beautiful instrumentation that weaves a stunning, leafy tapestry. Few artists strike gold on every record they create but, for the third time in a row, Lorde has done it again, crafting yet another world-beater”.
An album that I think was unfairly criticised by some. Many feel a little disappointed, but I feel Solar Power is a typically remarkable album from Lorde. One of the greatest songwriters of her generation, we are going to hear a lot more music from her. A fine work that deserves a lot more love, I know that Solar Power will…
SHINE bright for years.