Hear Me Out: ‘Melodrama’ by Lorde is the quintessential Gen Z album
The theatre of modern young womanhood is one of exhilarating highs offset by deeply crashing lows, all playing out against a backdrop of social norms, conformity, and conditioning that’s often far too complex a puzzle to crack. Nothing else in music has epitomised that cocktail of rush, invincibility, lust, and loneliness while railing against the world it is meant to exist in more than Melodrama by Lorde.
Released in 2017, the New Zealand singer’s sophomore effort is still a definitive expression of youth for those who orbited around its wake, the quintessential album for Gen Z as a tonic to the social media age, heartbreak, and the pressures of popularity. It is, in one, an acutely personal tell-all for life while also a transcendental, other-worldly magnum opus.
Indeed, ‘other-worldliness’ is a good place to start in capturing exactly why Melodrama went so far in defining a blooming new generation. Cast your mind back to the midpoint of the 2010s, and suddenly, the world had to relearn the blueprint of its musical soundtrack.
At the start of 2016, David Bowie suddenly passed away, and at his memorial during that year’s Brit Awards, Lorde appeared to give a seminal performance of ‘Life on Mars’ as Bowie himself had described her as the future of music. A little over a year later, with the release of Melodrama, it was clear that Lorde was here to give the aliens of youth their new sonic home.
While there’s no way you can give Bowie and Lorde a like-for-like comparison, this timeline maps out their energetic connection to make Melodrama the new soundtrack of youth in the way its Starman predecessors had captured in the decades gone by. Within recent memory, it was the first commanding sonic reckoning to the acknowledgement of growing up in a truly different world beset with challenges not faced by any generation before, doused with technological innovation and personal introspection while grappling with the sheer notion of how to just live your life within those walls.
After all, trying to grasp your own space in the world while still being blinded by naivety when it seemed that that landscape itself was falling to pieces was an indescribable phenomenon which Lorde managed to bottle in the liminal spaces of the record. Take its first five tracks – spanning from ‘Green Light’ to ‘Liability’, we have traversed the notions of breakneck hedonism right down to the darkest depths of despair and somehow have to swim out of that tsunami. If nothing else, it was the swirling contradictions of life laid bare, but it also carried an undercurrent for the younger generation of bearing the brunt of global issues that they did not create.
That paradox is precisely defined in the album’s closer, ‘Perfect Places’, where Lorde laments idly: “I hate the headlines and the weather/ I’m 19, and I’m on fire/ But when we’re dancing I’m alright/ It’s just another graceless night,” capturing the exact notion of being terrified to face the world, so your only coping mechanism is to temporarily forget about it.
The crux of Melodrama is rooted in its very name. The juxtapositions of the excitement and heartbreak of youth will not resonate with those in their middle age, but it is the exact summation of overflowing feeling experienced by Lorde’s self-named “loveless generation”, combining a specific moment in our sociopolitical worldview with personal reckoning to create a firework of Gen Z power.
