Solar Power

by Lorde

Released 20 August 2021

Universal

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Who’d have guessed Lorde’s butt would be so important to understanding Solar Power. 

After staying out of the spotlight for years, she returned - and broke the internet - with what would turn out to be the cheeky cover art to her long-awaited third album. 

It was a masterstroke. A single photo, of a beachy Lorde and her tuchus leaping over the camera lens, signalled an entire shift in sound and a whole new aesthetic. A picture tells a thousand words, and this one communicates a lot about the album’s contents.

Solar Power is relaxed, low-key, and sometimes sarcastic. It isn’t the serious, late-night, turbulent teen confessional Melodrama was. Filled with anthems of pleasure and pain, angst and excitement, Melodrama became something fans, young women in particular, clung to like a sacred text, to the point that countless memes begged Lorde to instruct them on what their whole new personality would be.

But Lorde is having none of that on Solar Power. ‘If you’re looking for a saviour, well that’s not me,” she cautions in album opener ‘The Path’, which immediately distinguishes itself from anything she’s done before. The warm guitars, vocal splashes, restrained beats, and unconventional structure define so much of the album’s palette.

She paints herself as a ‘teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash’, a star struggling with her own stardom, who ‘won’t take the call if it’s the label or the radio.’

"That was my way of being like, if this isn't for you, it's all good," Lorde tells triple j of the saviour lyric. "Like, I probably can't be what you need me to be all the time."

But then comes the frolicking title track, where Lorde is charged by carefree energy. She cancels all her plans, throws her phone in the ocean, and jokes about being 'kinda like a prettier Jesus.' 

Toying with Lorde’s revered status is a theme the album frequently returns to. The idea is taken to a playful extreme in the accompanying music videos: imagined as the leader of a Midsommar beach cult in ‘Solar Power’; a blonde Wiccan in a pseudo-spiritual coven for ‘Mood Ring’, an “extremely satirical” poke at wellness culture.

Solar Power finds its author thinking deeply about the jarring disconnect between being an extremely private person and an extremely well-known public figure. This is someone acutely aware of the absurdity of fame, which was foisted upon her at 16 and has waned very little since. 

She revisits those early years on the lilting ‘California’. The opening line - ‘Once upon a time in Hollywood when Carole called my name’ - chronicles the moment Carole King presented Lorde with the Song of the Year Grammy for ‘Royals’. 

She’s welcomed to the high life, only to find it’s not really her thing, lamenting countless dollars and hours spent on hotels and jets. ‘Goodbye to all the bottles, all the models, bye to the kids in the lines for the new Supreme,” she sings. ‘Don’t want that California love.’ 

On the upbeat ‘Secrets From A Girl (Who’s Seen It All)’ the 24-year-old offers wisdom to her younger self. ‘Couldn’t wait to turn 15/Then you blink and it’s been 10 years/ Growing up a little at a time then all at once/ Everybody wants the best for you/ But you gotta want it for yourself/My love’. Cementing the track as one of the album’s highlights is a closing monologue from Robyn. Yes, Swedish electropop icon Robyn, who supplies a surreal flight attendant voiceover. 

She fantasises about escaping to a private island with a ‘trunkful of Simone and Céline’ and designer magazines (“of course!”) in ‘Leader of a New Regime’. Reality is, Lorde has retreated to her native Auckland, escaping the celeb circus to be left alone spending her days on low-pressure activities like sunbathing, yoga, and getting ‘Stoned At The Nail Salon’.

Finding no comfort in star power, Lorde instead finds solace in nature: the power of the sun, the ocean, the beach. The emblematic chirping of New Zealand cicadas in summer (as sampled on closer ‘Oceanic Feeling’). 

There’s even a vague paean to the climate crisis, ‘Fallen Fruit’, which channels the haunting aura of 1960s folk. It’s The Mamas & The Papas for a generation anxious about a global temperature past the point of no return. It also contains the album’s only drum machine, a snapping 808 in the bridge.

"I hope it makes people go outside,” Lorde told triple j earlier this year. “Really just get out there and listen to what the natural world has to tell them. That's my goal for this [album]."

That’s easier said than done in our current COVID-stricken climate, but the idea - that Mother Nature can heal us in ways modern technology cannot - is one that resonates with the earthier sound of Solar Power.

As much as Lorde has done a great job communicating in album press where she’s coming from with Solar Power - inspired by “Flower Child culture”, mixed with the kinds of acts that populated 2000s So Fresh… compilations: All Saints, S Club 7, Natalie Imbruglia, Nelly Furtado - it’s still a little surprising to hear how low-key she gets here.

The thematic deconstruction of stardom extends to the sound, a sunnier, mellower pivot away from the self-mythologising that big pop albums tend towards.

Solar Power is willingly out of touch with current trends, the music is easy going with almost zero grandiosity. And in a lot of cases, doesn’t bother to embellish in doing more than it needs to. 

Producer Jack Antonoff provides the intimate, organic vibe and Lorde, for the first time, harmonies with backing singers, including Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo, plus Kiwi artists Maron Williams and James Milne (of Lawrence Arabia).

But that star power is downplayed. There’s no ‘Royals’, and nothing even close to ‘Green Light’. The title track is the only thing approximating the kind of all-in sing-along that would elevate a live set. Solar Power isn’t screaming for your attention or vying to compete with big pop stars. It’s content to do its own strange little thing, and dedicated to doing that very well. 

That’s refreshing, and very much by design. But after a four-year wait, it’s fair enough if it leaves you wanting more. Even after several spins with the record, some songs struggle to make a lasting impression, running all-too-briefly and relying on evoking a mood rather than memorable melodies and choruses. 

It would be easy to dismiss some of her cheeriness as corny, or misinterpret the loungey energy as lazy. But even if she’s not engaging with the pop rules, Lorde is still a studio artisan. 

Thankfully, Lorde’s talent for lyrics has only sharpened, and a song like ‘The Man With The Axe’ proves it. It’s a moving love song, enriched by the slow-mo, spacey sensation of falling for someone as Lorde elegantly details her life on stage coming undone for ‘the boy with the plan/You felled me clean as a pine’.

Whether she’s memorialising her late dog, Pearl (‘Big Star’) or playing tongue-in-cheek (‘Dominoes’), you can hear the four years of growth and lived experience between releases. Lorde is clearly not the same person that wrote Melodrama, let alone Pure Heroine. 

Lest we forget that her career first exploded with ‘Royals’, on which a frustrated Auckland teen fixated on how alien and out-of-reach the superstar lifestyle seemed to her suburban existence in “cities you’ll never see on screen”. That was before, of course, the 16-year-old went supernova.

Whatever Solar Power lacks in some areas, it more than makes up for as a fascinating interrogation of Lorde’s own legacy. 

It’s tempting to think of it as her own Blonde on Blonde or Kid A - an album that unapologetically reshapes what we think we know about the artist.

It actively defies the Sad Girl archetype she unwittingly ushered in. It surprises by actively sidestepping being measured against the artists and spirit Lorde helped pave the way for, a generation of kindred spirits like Halsey, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, Mallrat, and many more.

In this way, Solar Power is “definitely [her] most complex work,” as Lorde told triple j earlier this year. “But I also love how light, playful, and fun it is."

Solar Power likely won’t define an era the way Pure Heroine did, or provide another blueprint for heartbreak, like Melodrama. But that’s the point.

It’s not a Lorde album for everybody, but you suspect that’s exactly the way she wants it.

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Source: Triplej

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