The two-year anniversary of Lorde’s junior album Solar Power came and went on August 20, but I still find myself questioning why fans like myself brushed the album off on its initial release.
By Erika Gedgaudus
photo: NPR
Lorde, one of the pioneering “Sad Girls” of the 2010s, alt-rocked the world with her single “Royals”, whose stripped instrumentals and edgy lyrics resonated particularly with teenagers coming into themselves (much like the then-16-year-old songwriter was doing herself, presumably). The hit launched Lorde into stardom resulting in three studio-length albums, the latest of which, Solar Power, was received relatively poorly by fans on initial release.
After two years of Solar Power’s existence, it has become my favorite Lorde album for the maturity it shows not only in its musicality, but also in the message it sends: “Everybody wants the best for you / But you gotta want it for yourself.” Solar Power exists for Lorde. I have to wonder if this is why Solar Power remains a middle-of-the-road album for other listeners (many consider it their least favorite Lorde album and, like myself, felt neutral at best upon first impression). The album explores self-love, something that remained untouched—or at least tainted by negativity—in her previous projects. Its uplifting tone and worldly themes breaks Lorde loose from her Sad Girl status; in their indifference towards the album, her audience is unwilling, or unable, to let her be happy.
Understanding the rise of Lorde’s fame may help us understand listeners’ response towards Solar Power. After the success of “Royals” came Lorde’s first studio-length album, Pure Heroine, which explored themes of grandeur, nostalgia, and what it means to fit in with one’s peers. The album was unquestionably successful and cemented Lorde as a Sad Girl musician, someone who would write about their woes in order to connect with an audience of similarly emotional listeners. (Other Sad Girls of the era include Lana Del Rey, Billie Eilish, and—controversially—Mitski, but can also include pre-2010s artists like Fiona Apple and even Joni Mitchell.) The album’s instrumentation kept in line with that of genre-bending breakout single “Royals”; heavy bass and drums fronted her sound, the singer’s voice is raspy and exudes little innocence expected of a teenager. Songs like “400 Lux” and “White Teeth Teens” discuss fitting in for the sake of social status, and “Ribs,” a fan-favorite of the album, is a reflection on growing up too quickly masqueraded as a beam of hope that everything will end up okay for the singer. The sound of the LP has been praised for its pioneering a new style of alternative sound, its few instrumentals shining through an era of heavy-handed and busy 2010s rock, pop, and EDM—made even more impressive by Lorde’s young age. Overall, the album is bleak, dreary, and extends a hand of solitude to teenage listeners similarly questioning the world around them.
photo: USA Today
Four years after the release of Pure Heroine Lorde released Melodrama, a hit before it even dropped: singles “Green Light”, “Perfect Places”, and “Homemade Dynamite” captivated the Sad Girl audience that had grown alongside the singer. Lorde introduced a new sound, one that was lighter, more punchy, more sonically— and thematically— complex. The singles showed that Lorde did some of the growing up she was so scared of á la “Ribs,” but remained grounded in its emotional, personal lyrics that were still broad enough to resonate with listeners. Melodrama ruminates on heartbreak, self-awareness, and mastering the sudden celebrity status satirized in her previous LP. The project can be encapsulated by the lyrics “When you see me, will you say I’ve changed?”; it was bigger and bolder than its predecessor, but still maintained the Sad Girl tone throughout, from its instrumentals tinting the album with darkness to Lorde’s alto—albeit more controlled—vocals showing that despite her inevitable world experience, she remains the same person she was in Pure Heroine. Audiences especially praised the album’s ballads, “Liability” and “Writer in the Dark,”, for their extreme honesty heard not only in the lyrics but in Lorde’s voice itself. The album was a triumph, showing how Lorde could blend her emotions with a more commercial sound catered towards an audience of fellow Sad Girls.
After another four-year break, Lorde released Solar Power. The title track was the first single to drop, which was received with open arms by fans. It was rightfully dubbed the song of the summer due to its beachy drums, breezy guitar, and the message that we should really just throw our phones “into the water” to enjoy life as it comes. Its second single “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” however, threw listeners like myself; where was the tragedy? The drama? The grandeur mocked and subsequently celebrated in her previous two projects? The song is a reflection on change and Lorde’s accustoming to a more concealed life outside of the public eye, something the average listener is unable to immediately relate to. It lacked melodrama, for lack of a better word. When the album finally dropped, Lorde came out swinging, telling her fans, “If you’re looking for a savior, well that’s not me / You need someone to take your pain for you? / Well that’s not me.” Within the first two minutes of Solar Power she sheds the dependence her audience has on her; it began as an ability to put audiences’ feelings into words—thus proclaiming her a queen, if you will, of the Sad Girl genre—and fizzled out into a parasocial hold over Lorde’s own emotions and experiences.
Instead, Lorde redirects listeners to nature, asking them to look on the outside for their own “path.” Having established her selfhood, Lorde uses the rest of the album to focus on understanding her own feelings without passing them through a filter of expectant emotions. There is a sweetness present in the lyrics and instrumentals; even the vocal performance and album art is lighter and brighter than her last two projects. I surmise that this is the reason listeners did not immediately click with the album’s sound—without having an expectant Sad Girl to proclaim one’s feelings for them, how could they relate to or enjoy the album?
Interestingly, Solar Power has more ballads than Melodrama, making it a more apt contender for the Sad Girl crown on paper. However, where Melodrama discusses broad, universal emotions (“I’m a liability / I’m a little much for everyone”), Solar Power hones in on Lorde’s unique relationships without leaving the wiggle room Melodrama did. “Secrets from a Girl” is a reflection on Lorde’s own relationship to fame and how it influenced her growing up; “Big Star” is about her late dog Pearl, a final goodbye to the one that knew her best; “The Man with the Axe” is a tragic “love song” assumedly about someone she used to trust. While every listener is free to take what they want from any song, the tenderness of each track feels so intimate that Solar Power begins to come across as an album she wrote intending to keep to herself. “Oceanic Feeling,” Solar Power’s final track, feels sonically and lyrically like a final letting go of Lorde’s past. The artist speaks in detail of her family, of the prospect of having a daughter, of letting go of the “cherry-black lipstick” that defined her persona for so long. She ends the track and the album with the line, “I’ll know when it’s time to take off my robes / and step into the choir.” Eight years have passed since her genre-defying debut, and the now-26-year-old has settled into (or at least is not rattled by) the prospect of letting go of her celebrity and stardom. Perhaps this can explain listeners’ unwillingness to praise the project, for their reliance on Lorde as a Sad Girl has stripped them of their own individuality, and when that reliance is ripped away from them, they cannot accept their own feeling lost.
Lorde and Phoebe Bridgers on stage performing "Stoned at the Nail Salon" at Primavera Sound 2022 / photo: POPline
Wariness towards happier music by Sad Girls is not exclusively a Lorde phenomenon. Phoebe Bridgers, a new-age indie rock Sad Girl released “Sidelines” in 2022, a song that her audience brushed off nearly immediately. This could not be due to its hope-inspiring instrumentals, as the musician’s former singles “Kyoto” and “ICU” have even brighter sounding sonics that remain some of the artist’s most popular work (likely because the lyrics remain in line with Bridgers’s other songs, which are crass, edgy, and unforgiving). It could not be due to its airy, near-droning vocals, as other songs like “Demi Moore” and “Chelsea” have similar vocal tonality and remain popular with her fans. I suspect audience indifference towards “Sidelines” is due in part to its lyrics, which proclaim, “I’m not afraid of anything at all… Had nothing to prove / ‘Til you came into my life / Gave me something to lose.” The lyrics are candidly optimistic, unlike nearly every other Bridgers song listeners are accustomed to. The happiness of “Sidelines” makes it boring to Sad Girl enjoyers who appear in both Lorde and Bridgers’s circles to wish that the artists remain melancholy in order to be used as some kind of emotional scapegoat for listeners.
The conclusion I draw is not placing blame on fans who feel like they need an emotional release through music. Melancholy music exists for a reason, both for fans and musicians themselves. However, relying on and expecting artists to create infinitely sad media places unfair responsibility on them to remain tethered to the Sad Girl crown that is dawned upon them. Even though I, like many other Lorde fans, was not inspired by Solar Power upon its release, I enjoyed it far more when I shook off the label of Sad Girl for all the musicians I look up to—Lorde, Phoebe Bridgers, Fiona Apple, the infamously anti-Sad Girl Mitski—and viewed them instead as growing women with lives of their own to experience.
When I listen to Solar Power, it feels as though I’m sitting at the beach listening to a friend share their deepest secrets with me. However, where I feel intimacy, peace, and hope, other fans seem bored by this—they want secrets that come with suffering. They want the 16-year-old thrust into fame and still scared of it, the coked-up and quickly crashing feeling that Melodrama presents. By brushing Solar Power off to the side, listeners admit they crave the sadness of another in order to deal with their own. This becomes incredibly problematic not just for artists, but for the person they are behind their personas. Singer-songwriter Mitski once controversially called the Sad Girl label “tired and reductive”, implying that listeners who refuse to participate in l’art pour l’art in favor of checking off labeled boxes are interacting with music the wrong way. Rather than letting music guide their emotions with a degree of separation, Sad Girl enjoyers try desperately to cram art into a category that suits them (and are confused when it doesn’t work).
It begs the question: Why do listeners need women to be sad? As fans, should we not be supportive of an artist’s emotional maturity? Using women’s sadness as a crutch—and being unsupportive when that sadness is no longer made available to consume—only asserts the subconscious (or conscious, for some) notion that female suffering should be commercialized and used as entertainment. But Lorde can’t be a depressed 16-year-old forever; the Sad Girl label and genre becomes more and more limiting as an artist’s career progresses, creating a vicious cycle where no party involved is allowed to be happy. Only when it is stripped can musicians create and listeners enjoy their magnum opuses. With Solar Power, Lorde did the growing up that fans like myself needed to do to enjoy the album in all its triumphs.
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