Every Lorde album ranked from worst to best
When taking in an artist’s discography, you can only pray for evolution. In the case of Lorde, that has been the basis of her entire career.
She signed to a label at 13, released her first record at 16, and now has four albums already under her belt by the age of 29. For most people, that period of youth is spent finding their place in the world, honing their craft, and then possibly making a product of it by the end. But Lorde has never been a person to sit back and let an opportunity pass her by.
In this sense, she is undeniably one of the most exciting young talents that the industry has ever heralded, but at the same time, it hasn’t been a constant production line of juggernaut hits, which have caused the singer to lose her way and dilute the spark of her voice. Every song, album, and moment is crafted with a particular intention, and that process takes time.
That mantra means that each chapter of Lorde’s back catalogue is completely defined in its outset – no copy and paste jobs are in sight here, only the truest expressions of life, identity, and feeling as she sees it at that time. There’s no way of pitting any one of those eras against another, but in ranking all her albums, you can simply see how the seeds of her sonics have grown into something more and more fruitful as the years have worn on.
Every Lorde album ranked from worst to best:
Solar Power
Listen, there are a lot of Solar Power haters out there in the world, so to be clear, I am not one of them. The hazy beams of sunlight, the weed, and the folkish introspection made it an album marked by departure for the singer, who up to this point had been defined in a landscape of city lights and the soaring highs of a socialite life.
Solar Power’s quieter and far more psychedelic tone very much stands on its own two feet, and there are true gems in its midst like the title track and ‘Stoned at the Nail Salon’, but much of the rest of the record uses its haze to blur into one sunny lullaby. For those in search of Lorde’s blistering words and electronic beats, this is not the place.
Pure Heroine
I could barely string a coherent thought together at the age of 16, never mind create an album which would define the rest of my life. But that’s the difference with Lorde – she has always had that rather omniscient view of the world, with a mind and songwriting talent that, even from an early age, was just a cut above the rest.
Pure Heroine, her 2013 debut, serves decadence and revelations in abundance. The emergence of that distinct sound was nothing short of electrifying at the time. With songs like ‘Ribs’, ‘Buzzcut Season’, and ‘A World Alone’ becoming definitive hits and staples of the Gen Z canon, there’s no denying their impact. But listening now, it’s very clear this was a 16-year-old with so much more to do. The songs are nostalgia-soaked; not necessarily reflective of our lives now, but a chalice of a time where everything felt possible.
Virgin
Leaping from one extreme of time to another, Lorde’s most recent album Virgin tells you everything you need to know about the artist at this point in her life as much as any other. The whole point is that it’s transient, spiky, searing, and not always straightforward. But neither is the outside world, and still we keep moving forward.
There are so many areas of possible deep dives to explore over the expanse of the record, but the most important theme is that of transition. Whether that means in gender, in sound, in identity, or in ages and phases of life, there is something inherently fleeting in Virgin. An era to catch and savour while we can as another addition to the electro-pop explosion, before letting it go for something new.
Melodrama
The dreaded second album is something which is infamously hyped up to break artists. But with Lorde’s reckoning to this outdated ideal, she instead reached totally into the sublime. Thematically bridging adolescence into adulthood, Melodrama was quite simply a masterpiece in electro-pop from the very first second it hit the airwaves in 2017.
In a lot of ways, it is going to be the album which defines Lorde over the course of the rest of her career, no matter what she does next. To some, that might seem like a sting in the tail, to have an album you wrote at 19 still following you around the better part of a decade later, but in Lorde’s world, that’s the magic that comes with creating a pièce de résistance so young.
