‘Melodrama’ album review
By Jerrison Oracion, Senior Columnist
5/5
For three months, everyone at the Other Press has been waiting for 20-year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s (a.k.a. Lorde) next album Melodrama to be released. Now, as of June 16, it is out, and all of us can finally listen to this much-awaited album.
In a note that the artist wrote in her bed, she describes the album as “Two years of breathlessness and hunger—A new sound. A new scene; A drink. A drumbeat,” and she hopes that you will “listen for every breath and broken heartstring.”
The album involves a series of breakups and hangovers, going back and forth throughout the record. Each time Lorde dates someone, she breaks up with the person, goes to a party, and has a hangover.
Melodrama begins with the first hit single from the album, “Green Light,” with its British pop sound. Just like the music video of the song, she breaks up with someone, goes to a club, dances on top of a van, and ends up on a bridge in the morning. In “Sober,” she has a night out with a boy, drinks liquor with lime, and they end up with hangovers, which is explained in the second part of the song, “Sober II (Melodrama).” She dates another boy in “The Louvre,” except that she upsets the people around her and she uses the famous museum as a metaphor for their situation.
The second hit single from the album, “Liability,” involves a boy breaking up with her because, he says, “You’re a little much for me.” “Loveless” sounds like background music and a transition between “Hard Feelings” and the second part of “Sober.”
In “Writer in the Dark,” Lorde sounds like singer Feist. Lorde dreams about a relationship in “Supercut,” and it is interesting that the song ends with the line, “We were wild and fluorescent, come home to my heart.” The album ends with the third hit single from the album, “Perfect Places,” which talks about Lorde trying to find perfect places due to all the bad that is happening in the world. She asks the question, “What the f**k are perfect places anyway?” The answer to her question is that perfect places are just that: perfect places.
With a running time of just over 40 minutes, the album is short, but it has a lot to digest. Some of the songs on it have similar music to what Lorde used in her previous album Pure Heroine. Although the album does not have an explicit content warning, there are swear words in some of the songs, which means that we hear her swear in a song for the first time. Melodrama has a combination of the music that Lorde usually makes and British Pop music. The young singer/songwriter had some help on the album, as Swedish singer Tove Lo partially wrote the song “Homemade Dynamite.”
When you find out what Lorde has been doing in the past two years, you will be in melodrama.
