Lorde Learns She Can’t Party Away Her Melancholy on ‘Melodrama’

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Four years between albums, and Lorde makes it sound as if all she did was party. Not that she was having much fun.

On “Melodrama,” her second album, Lorde’s nights out are a swirl of drunken flirtations and reckless hookups, where she tries to forget herself but ends up more lonely and self-conscious than ever. Momentary pleasures lead to lasting regrets; trivial interactions can seem cataclysmic. It’s an exceedingly narrow slice of life, but Lorde inhabits it with feverish intensity.

The album’s opener and lead single, “Green Light,” leaps right into all her conflicting impulses: She’s furious at an ex but still struggling to let go, though, she also notes, “sometimes I wake up in a different bedroom.” Quick, bouncy piano chords, a foot-stomping beat and eager backup singers can only emphasize that she’s “waiting for that green light” of real independence — not that she’s found it yet. But the song’s joyous major chords already sound as though she’s busted loose.

In extensive social-media posts and interviews, Lorde — born Ella Yelich-O’Connor — has presented “Melodrama” as autobiographical, summing up the time since her debut album, “Pure Heroine,” particularly “the last 2 wild, fluorescent years of my life,” she wrote on Twitter.

It’s a deeply selective account. Between albums (and between parties), Lorde was also the hard-working musician she portrayed herself as in “Still Sane” on “Pure Heroine.” She toured the world, supervised the soundtrack for “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1” (with a song of her own) and worked steadily on the songs that would follow her world-conquering debut. Amid the party reminiscences on “Melodrama,” she also sings about a breakup that she insists was partly triggered by her growing fame: He “hated hearing my name on the lips of a crowd,” she sings in “Writer in the Dark.”

Lorde was all of 16, and clearly wise beyond her years, when “Pure Heroine” was released. In most of the songs on that album, Lorde presented herself as a voice of ordinary teenagers, particularly the middle-class teens in her hometown in New Zealand. She often sang about them as a shared “we,” and while they knew they were a world away from glamour or renown, on their own terms they were heroes and gladiators; Lorde’s music, overdubbing her own voice, cast them as ghostly chorales and majestic choirs. “Royals,” her career-making international hit, was a yearning repudiation of what pop and hip-hop songs were flaunting for teenagers like her: “Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece,” shaping fantasies until “We’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams.”

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With that song, and the rest of “Pure Heroine,” Lorde became a pop star herself. It would make anyone’s head spin and give anyone second thoughts; no wonder Lorde, now 20, took so long to make a second album. She had an infinitude of choices; she had worldwide recognition and new friends like her fellow teen conquistadora, Taylor Swift.

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