You guys know who this is, but I'm still gonna try some background.

BACKGROUND

There’s so many narratives one could pull out from the background of this record. The first one’s a bit vapid: Lorde as the up-and-comer, the alt-pop rebel, the Soundcloud breakout, all while she’s only 17! The Love Club EP dropped in 2012 on Soundcloud, and started gaining buzz across the blogosphere. An early Reddit post feels symbolic of the beginning of her rise: “Lorde, a 17yr girl from NZ has a new EP which is definitely bringing the next level future pop zef.” Never mind the flagrant misuse of “zef,” but it’s a perfect summary of who she was at one point: a budding artist with a keen ear for beats and some great capabilities with a pen. A comment on a different post hints at the narrative that’s more accurate, yet more exhausting in 2019: “It's too manufactured in a way, you can really tell they're going for a specific scene and vibe with her. Like Lana Del Rey but they're being more subtle about it.” This is true: Lorde grew up in a privileged NZ neighborhood, and she’s been signed since she was 14, cultivating an image for herself. Yet deriding her, Lana, or any one artist for being supposedly planted is blatant posturing - at the very least, it sure as hell has no place in judging the music on its own merits.
“Royals” eventually blew up off the EP to ridiculous buzz, and months later it was officially released as the lead single to her debut. Its popularity consistently had the air of "teen genius" around it, which worked mostly to the detriment of Lorde who was inevitably shat upon by the holier-than-thou for writing songs that dare to be violently teenaged. Think-pieces recall how gestures like this could be mobilized as political statements – see NYT: “Lorde’s ‘Royals’ is Class-Conscious.” Nowadays, a song like this would receive more vocal pushback – see USA Today: “Taylor Swift has angered many people with her 'You Need To Calm Down' release.” Yet the post-“Price Tag” teen sanctimony of “Royals” was lauded, landing a spot at #2 on Pazz and Jop’s best singles of 2013. Following “Royals,” Pure Heroine dropped in September 2013, almost a year after its independent distribution and months after its official label-backed release. It was great. Note that poptimism wasn’t quite in full swing, and liking Lorde wasn’t really a hip move – after the tragic critical reception of Born to Die, it’s a miracle it was beloved by any publications at all.
Nowadays, Lorde is seen as a pop artist, less a symbol of the cynical mainstream industry and more a songwriter in her own right. The disappointment comes with the narrative that surrounds her transition into crit-adoration, the idea of maturity over the trajectory of her career and that her first record was simply the boring teen pop she had to break out of. Often the narrative centers Jack Antonoff, and even haters tend to aim their disdain towards his efforts rather than Lorde. It’s never a good sign when people seem to treat pop music with the women songwriters as secondary to the apparent geniuses that are working in the soundbooth. Pure Heroine may owe a lot to Joel Little, but when many of his most recent works have failed to capture what Pure Heroine did, one realizes that the album itself was likely a great one because of Lorde herself.

THE ALBUM

You’re not going to learn anything new from this writeup. Yes, the “don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk” / “let em talk” bookends are very cool: a bit of neat conceptual aspiration that was fully realized later on Melodrama. Sure, “Ribs” is some sort of adolescent house party (both genre and location) anthem that totally gets the feelings of growing up down to a T. Hey, this did kickstart the airy boom-clap beats (Charli reference being intentional and purposeful - her only solo hit sounding nothing like the True Romance era nor anything that came after is indicative of something) that define much of the decade’s hits.
There’s plenty of better, more educated writers who could tell you loads about Lorde’s influence and influences. If you’re reading this, you probably understand the streamline between Lorde’s mainstream reception and the sudden birth of young acts determined to reach out to the teens as an alternative, a symbol of authenticity among what’s deemed vapid chart music. Perhaps this was the one negative impact of Pure Heroine - the retreat back into tired tropes of singesongwriter supremacy that was witnessed with 21. 2015 brought the class of Alessia Cara, Troye Sivan, Halsey, and Melanie Martinez to the forefront: each carried the mantle of relatability (Melanie less so, but the surrounding narrative scope of Cry Baby and her presence on The Voice were helpful towards establishing her as a real artist), yet none can really be said to have matched the quality of Pure Heroine. What gives?
That question’s best answered using a review of a song on Frozen. One of my favorite closers to a review is in Brad Shoup’s review of “Let It Go”: “to a four-year-old this must seem like the biggest music in the world.” Age that by about ten years, and you’ve got Pure Heroine. Its sonic palette has obvious and non-obvious influences. An initial comparison is Lana, whose debut seems to set up a downtempo, lyrically dense precedent for some of the songs on Pure Heroine. But further comparisons are necessary: Gotye and Kimbra have the geographical proximity, and their 2011 records Vows and Making Mirrors layer vocals over often minimal alt arrangements that contain echoes of Joel Little’s pristine aesthetic. Yet the most prominent influences were in the underground: Purity Ring’s Shrines has similarly electronic bombast, iamamiwhoami and Grimes can be heard in shades. That’s not even counting the works of rap and EDM producers that undoubtedly played a role here - think Flume or Clams Casino. One could argue Pure Heroine came into existence from the necessity for the mainstream to co-opt the underground’s sound eventually: Soundcloud’s finest transmuted into its marketable shapes. And it’s so brilliant.
I haven’t been able to arrange my thoughts on this record in any elegant fashion. I was considering just a series of hot takes, but then I realized I would piss people off. Here’s some assorted bullet points that I couldn’t figure out where to go with:

• “Tennis Court” doesn’t even wait to highlight what the main draw of the album is: Lorde’s voice. That pitch-shifted “yeah” was made to highlight EDM remixes, and guess what, it was! (see: Flume) That video is still iconic -- just her standing in a fucking room doing whatever. It’s probably the only video from this era I actually remember. I have more to say on the following song -- but make no mistake, those steel-pan-adjacent synths are lovely.
  
• “400 Lux” is in the typical tracklisting space usually used to highlight the lead single. While it’s not a single at all, it also happens to be absolutely the best song on the album, so good work on part of Lorde! Production like a warm midnight foghorn and string sections underwater, lyrics that settle on “I like you” two years prior to CRJ really really liking you. Her best love song, one where she doesn’t speak for anybody except her and you. “You buy me orange juice” is the meme, but my favorite line is “you pick me up and take me home again” -- repeated for both emphasis and confirmation of how fucking great it is to be alone in a car with just somebody else.
  
• “Royals” begins like Feist’s “Brandy Alexander,” with an elegant arrangement, yet instead of settling into light fare becomes akin to AWOLNATION’s “Sail” - an underrated bit of pop that undoubtedly had just as much impact - in its electronic buzzes. Perhaps Ryan Tedder plays a big role in the softening that pop experienced in the 2010s. Not her best, but not bad and definitely still amazing.
  
• You’ve heard enough about “Ribs.” Conan Gray’s Corny Ass (one I adore very much, and yet another post-Lorde artist, though given his obvious parallels to Troye perhaps he’s more post-post-Lorde) mentioned it on Twitter to get dragged by the true Lorde stans. But hasn’t it always been a universal Gen Z sad song? Even for those outside of the target demographic it works its spell; see the Pitchfork review of Pure Heroine concluding with a commendation of “Ribs” as the mature work it is. People kind of forget that it’s literally a dance song, though -- easily the most danceable in her discography? Tell me there isn’t an analogue between this and Robyn’s “Honey.” And I think this might be the most explicit cultural reference on the album, to Broken Social Scene’s “Lover’s Spit,” a name-drop more intelligent than what songwriters influenced by Lorde would do in the future. (see: Arlo Parks’ invocation of Gerard Way and Courtney Love). The only other example I can think of is a subtle, perhaps unintentional one: the name-drop of “wicked games” on “Tennis Court.” Perhaps a use of a good cliche, yet the sonic palette would make intentional allusion probable.
  
• “Buzzcut Season” precedes “Glory and Gore” in its dystopian YA novel film adaptation glitz, less trailer music and more the credits sequence. The almost-vibraphone melody is the prettiest sound on the album, and the postponing of the hook is a clever songwriting quirk. When you’re younger, you really do convince yourself of how hellish life is. In 2020, a line like “explosions on TV” is a different, more real kind of frightening. Some of the best harmonization on the record.
  
• “Royals” was the big hit, but “Team” was the song I heard every day on the morning car ride to school. The intro is Lorde’s best: a mantra pitch-shifted until rendered mute. The production is some of Lorde’s best, akin to cuts on the lighter The Love Club EP - more on that later. Like “Royals,” there’s a worrying anti-pop sentiment, present in “I'm kind of over gettin' told to throw my hands up in the air,” but I enjoy the possibility in the phrase being a statement against giving up -- perhaps a stretch, yet one I enjoy as a lyric that contradicts ideas of Gen Z as humanity’s laziest.
  
• “Glory and Gore” probably couldn’t exist without “High for This.” House of Balloons was murky and ugly, and “Glory and Gore” is the murkiest and ugliest Pure Heroine has to offer. Melodrama explored the uglier parts of Lorde’s vocal timbre, but “Glory and Gore” was an early example of her as sheer raw force -- just hear that “and the choir goes out!” No wonder Lorde was asked to curate the soundtrack to a Hunger Games film when she can so easily utilize violent metaphor, writing songs about teenage drama as if she’s been reading up on dystopian YA fiction. It worked then, works now.
  
• Beginning with some excellent vocal panning and stereo effects (compare to alt-J’s “Bloodflood”), “Still Sane” is Lorde’s most underrated. “I’m not in the swing of things” serves as an excellent summation of adolescent lethargy; “not in the swing of things yet” is a lyric I never registered as positive until now. It feels like an acknowledgment of possible hypocrisy in “Team” and “Royals,” that she knows that as a popular artist she’s likely going to be corrupted by the system she indulges in.
  
• Wait, fuck, I forgot about “White Teeth Teens.” Now that’s underrated. Marching band percussion (best rhythm section on the album!), wonky ‘50s radio vocal sampling in the back, that bridge where she just talks shit about herself over a trap beat, FUCK! The fact that the final section is that one vocal loop and the pre-chorus is great. Perhaps the most beautiful section on the album outside of “Ribs.”
  
• Or outside of “A World Alone.” I was both wrong about “White Teeth Teens” and “Ribs” in that this is the most beautiful on the album and the most danceable. The xx guitar riff is the only bit of remotely acoustic instrumentation on the album. Had the album sounded entirely like this, a song like this wouldn’t stand out at all, and the album would’ve sucked. But given the journey Lorde takes through the darkest, dirtiest bits of synthesized squalls, “A World Alone” is a song that’s deserving of the title of shiniest, prettiest song on the album. A revelation.
  

Oh, damn it, I ended up writing on every song anyways. The only non-song bullet point I had was that it’s less likely that there’s any sort of “indie girl voice,” and more likely that most people don’t have the capacity to distinguish vocalists that are women. Well. The extended tracks are great, too, but I’m kind of running short on time here. Just remember that “The Love Club” is the best song Lorde has ever made, “Million Dollar Bills” is in her top five, and that her EP honestly has production like Grimes’s Visions, right? And don’t get me started on “Bravado” being an elegant dramatic piece and “Biting Down” being so underrated as her spookiest track and “No Better” being amazing the first time I heard it in my sister’s car and “Swingin Party” being the closest Lorde has sounded to St. Vincent’s “Champagne Year.”

CLOSING NOTES OR WHATEVER(?) (there's more on the legacy of this above)

Is Pure Heroine a classic? To the discerning critic, that title would probably go to Melodrama – more arcane structures, more conceptual, more of a statement. But I found Melodrama too fussy a record. Maybe it doesn’t matter if Pure Heroine is a classic. Now that I’m at the end of my high school career, too many records I loved growing up don’t even make me feel that much anymore. Blonde turned from a gorgeous comeback into a mushy songwriting mess. 99.9% is too summery for its own good, the sonics of Kaytranada now ubiquitous on the Pollen playlist. Telefone has “Yesterday” and “Bye Bye Baby,” but everything else rings a little twee now. Vampire Weekend went dad pop. Sufjan’s been cried into too much. I was honestly scared to listen to Pure Heroine for this. Would I hate it? I turned it on and immediately realized, haha, no. Still fun. It's been seven years. Pure Heroine soundtracked my entry into the year I discovered teens could be mean; it's now going to soundtrack the year I leave teenager-dom and have to make do with the real world. Still fun, still larger-than-life.

[ Removed by reddit in response to a copyright notice. ]