Lorde - SOlar Power
By Maya Marie
Lorde’s highly anticipated third album has been divisive, to say the least. Many hardcore Lorde fans feel betrayed by her move away from the minimal electronic pop of Pure Heroine and Melodrama in adoption of mellow, guitar roots for Solar Power. Others are just glad she finally seems happy. In terms of critical reception, the album has been branded “deeply uncool” (a compliment, apparently) by The Cut, and has stretched from 2- to 5-star reviews.
Each of Lorde’s previous albums have perfectly captured different stages of growing up. She’s roaming and ruling the suburbs in Pure Heroine—as you do, when you’re in your mid-teens with not much to do and nowhere else to be—and navigating new, glamorous house parties, and the accompanying intoxication, in 2017’s Melodrama. These albums arrived at the right moments in my (and, indeed, most of Lorde’s core fanbase’s) adolescence to feel perfectly relatable. Solar Power has similarly landed at the perfect time. Aside from the occasional lamentation on fame, the album’s more mature thematic and sonic focuses—global warming, spirituality, nature, family, and the corresponding Laurel Canyon psychedelic folk soundscapes—are deeply pertinent for anyone navigating the world now, especially if you’re experiencing the ‘quarter-life crisis’, with which Rolling Stone associates this album. Lorde beautifully walks the line between lyrical particulars and universality. Her experimentation with warmer, natural acoustic instruments—guitar, keys, percussion, and vocal harmonies—offers some truly exciting and joyful moments. Yet, it does feel like experimentation – not all songs meet the mark, some not building to anything and others repetitive and unoriginal (not something often attributed to Lorde; Bowie believed her to be “the future of music”).
The album’s first single, and titular track, establishes the sun-soaked allure of Solar Power, inviting you into its world: “it’s a new state of mind, are you coming, my baby?”. ‘Solar Power’ shocked listeners on its release with its stripped-back and earthy instrumentation, a first for Lorde, but the song’s care-free spirit and euphoria ultimately won many over. Much like the rest of the album, it transmits a ‘vibe’ that one can’t help but like, even if the individual songs aren’t Lorde’s strongest. Yet, ‘Solar Power’ provides a false promise that the album will be similarly light and fun, which it certainly is not. In the best moments on Solar Power, Lorde dives into the twisted depths of sun-loving spirituality, fame, and climate change.
‘Stoned at the Nail Salon’, Solar Power’s second single, hints at these more interesting themes, as Lorde explores the implications of growing up and calming down in the laid-back ballad. For Lorde, settling down consists of her appreciating life beyond fame and the stage, but the song is perfectly evocative of any sort of mellowing out, “whatever that means” and “wherever that leads”, as Lorde remarks.
One of the album’s strangest, but also most successful songs, is ‘Mood Ring’. Lorde satirically channels a new persona to mock the cultural appropriation and emotional distance of faux-spiritualism—cleansing crystals and gap year-ing to “somewhere eastern”. She highlights the irony of adopting spiritual philosophy within capitalist consumer culture as she wears a Gwenyth Paltrow-esque wig and burns sage in the song’s music video, singing “today my mood is as dark as my roots, if I ever let them grow out.” Yet, satire is a fine line and Lorde occasionally becomes patronising and clumsy, equating practicing “sun salutations” with relying on a mood ring to determine how you feel. All of these lyrical cultural references are accompanied by early-2000s pop beats and a guitar picking pattern that is not unlike that of TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’. It’s all very weird but works somehow.
‘Fallen Fruit’ is the best song on the album: an enchanting coalescence of 70s psychedelic folk harmonies and Lorde’s signature 808, which drops eerily in the second verse. Layered in religious metaphors, Lorde explores the environmental burden placed on our generation due to the carelessness of those preceding us. She beautifully articulates our impossible position: “But how can I love what I know I’m going to lose?”
Other highlights include ‘California’, most akin to Lorde’s previous albums in its addictive hooks and minimal accompaniment, but sweeter, and more seductive, much like the California lifestyle she rejects as “just a dream”, and ‘Secrets of a Girl (Who’s Seen it All)’. In this song, Lorde leans in close and whispers the wisdom she has accumulated over the years since Pure Heroine, reassuring today’s 16-year-olds that what they’re going through is perfectly fine. You will either love or hate the song’s spoken outro from Robyn with its cringe, on the nose flight analogy.
The previously listed songs are so good they make the album’s near misses almost worth it—almost. ‘Leader of a New Regime’ offers the interesting futuristic concept of leaving the ruined earth for a new planet, yet melodically and instrumentally it is indistinguishable from ‘The Path’ and ‘Stoned and the Nail Salon’. The lyrics are lost in the sleepy guitar reverb present throughout.
Lorde idolises her partner’s office job in comparison to her fame in ‘The Man with the Axe’, a song which has brief poetic moments, but is ultimately underscored by a repetitive, dull melody and swampy accompaniment. Without a chorus, this song is hard to cling on to.
When describing her shallow ex-lover in ‘Dominoes’, Lorde is also at her most shallow. The content is uninteresting from an outsider’s perspective, and the guitar strumming pattern is plain irritating. ‘Dominoes’ feels so out of place amidst the complexity and depth offered on many of the album’s other songs.
The journey ends well with ‘Oceanic Feeling’, a 6-and-a-half-minute ode to New Zealand, family, and nature: all harmonising in universal unity. This song is the perfect finishing note for the vibe that the rest of Solar Power begins to offer, though I doubt many people would often listen to this song in isolation.
Despite a few let-down moments, Solar Power is a beautifully immersive album that articulates subjects necessary to discuss but rejected by the rest of pop music.