I discovered this album in summer of 2021. I had heard a few songs here and there but I hadn’t gotten into the full immersive experience that is the album. It’s one of the major albums that has defined 2021 for me so as the sun sets for the 2021, I want to look back and reflect on this year
It could be sunset or dawn:light creeping through the blinds, illuminating half of a young woman’s face as she lies in bed, dark hair strewn across a pillow. She looks towards us, as if she’s been stirred from her sleep, pulled from a bad dream into a reality that’s just as wild and brutal as what her subconscious mustered.
Modern existence can be brilliant and colourful and numbing all at once, and Lorde is perhaps the first artist of our generation to articulate this properly.
If records about solitude and shifting relationships tend to gloss over the small details of how that changes someone, Melodrama is our generation’s first album that appreciated those nuances. It is wise and yet vulnerable, often violent in its imagery. Melodrama bleeds that semi-masochistic feeling. Of allowing yourself to be in love or happy, knowing the end will hurt anyway.
Sure,Melodrama is dramatic (it’s in the title after all), but it also speaks to our generation’s desire to not take things so seriously stupid as fuck, laughing off a pain we feel stuck in. It’s a record for a generation who tweet memes about their depression, in an attempt, maybe, to manifest a cure somewhere out in the ether. But also just because it’s good to extol our emotions for working when they feel mute in daily life.
It’s no surprise that the album’s cult following remains strong some 4 years after its initial release. That people see it as an emotional refuge that may take them back to a time and place, while still allowing that meaning to evolve, moulding perfectly to situations in your life that have arisen since. For we spend so much time begging to feel smthn that even pain is a positive sign we’re still capable of feeling at all. Lorde’s sophomore record will always speak to that: “All the glamour, and the trauma and the fucking melodrama” of what it means to be young, bitter, brilliant and lonely all at once.
