









With the release this week of Lorde’s third album, Solar Power, it’s clear that New Zealand pop auteur Ella Yelich-O’Connor was onto that cultural mood well ahead of the curve—perhaps the right amount to match the moment, yet maybe too much for broad appeal. The record’s the product of a nearly four-year retreat following her acclaimed second album Melodrama, and more pertinently after an intensive course of global fame launched by her mega-hit “Royals” in 2013, when she was only 16. Melodrama hit nowhere near the same commercial heights, but as the title indicates, it was still swept up in the grand emotions of coming of age in such a heady state, even as she expanded her musical range with songwriting and producing partner Jack Antonoff, albeit always with Lorde’s inborn, wry self-consciousness. Back then, in 2017, I guessed that Lorde might not sustain her engagement in the pop-star game for long; Solar Power finds her in the process of making her exit, though she’s not fully out the door.
During the first year of the pandemic, speculation was rife that the crisis would spur an exodus from cities to smaller or more remote towns. The claims were vastly overblown, but perhaps spoke to a collective fantasy: A back-to-the-land movement today would have ample precedent, with waves of rural retreat having arisen every few decades at troubled times, dating back to the Industrial Revolution. Given not only COVID, but the urgencies of climate change and last year’s metropolitan clashes over racial justice, there have been signs of some young radicals seeking more fertile ground for their ideals in the countryside—the way so many disillusioned hippies famously did in the 1970s.
Ultimately, it’s hard to say where exactly Solar Power goes. The album’s 12 tracks recount everything from fleeing Hollywood, like on the opening track, “The Path” in which Lorde confesses to “having nightmares from the camera flash” to winning Song of the Year at the 2014 Grammys before bidding farewell to classic rockstar fare: bottles, models, hotels, and jets. During the 43-plus minutes that make up Solar Power, Lorde toes the line between reveling in her past self and arriving at this new season of her life. “Now the cherry black lipstick’s gathering dust in a drawer / I don’t need her anymore / ‘cause I got this power,” she insists on “Oceanic Feeling,” referencing the dark pout that was long considered her signature look. On “The Man With the Axe,” Lorde criticizes her younger self, crooning, “I thought I was a genius, but now I’m twenty-two / And it’s startin’ to feel like all I know how to do is put on a suit and take it away.” It’s an honest admission about what celebrity has done to her psyche, but as a whole, the album plays like another cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame and fortune.