In our new in-depth series, Viva Classics, culture editor Karl Puschmann revisits and re-evaluates art from Aotearoa. First up: a deep dive into Lorde’s award-winning debut album, 2013′s Pure Heroine.
A famous quote from the seminal American crime drama The Wire advises, “If you come at the King, you best
On the album track Still Sane the then 15-year-old Lorde issues what at the time sounded like an insane claim. Now, it reads like a warning: “I’m little but I’m coming for the crown”.
If you come at the King you best not miss. On her 2013 debut album Pure Heroine, Lorde didn’t. The record created a different kind of buzz and saw Lorde ascend to pop royalty almost overnight.
That this collaboration between a bookish teenager from Devonport and a former pop-punk rocker would take over the western world is not just unlikely, it’s almost unfathomable.
Lorde had been a theatre kid since she was five. At 12 she entered a talent show where she performed Warwick Avenue by Welsh singer-songwriter Duffy. A video of this performance made its way to the desk of an executive at Universal Records. He saw potential and was quick to sign her to a development deal.
“I was 12 and thought: Why not? I didn’t have anything else planned, so I just started to write songs,” Lorde recounted to Red Bull in 2017.
By this age she’d been writing short stories “for years”, so pivoting to lyrics didn’t prove difficult. Although her literary ambition proved harder to shake.
“When I started making music, I saw myself primarily as a writer,” she admitted in that same interview. “The lyrics, and what I had to say, were most important to me.”
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Advertise with NZME.This is something she would return to again and again in her early interviews. When asked about her influences she would cite authors like Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath and Tobias Wolf instead of musicians or bands.
“My stuff can be consumed as words on a page or as sounds from a speaker, it’s up to you,” she told Glamour in 2013 when asked to describe her music.
Despite her obvious potential Universal had early trouble with Lorde. Searching for a hit they paired her with numerous song-writers-for-hire over the years. But Lorde, still going by her name Ella Yelich-O’Connor at that point, didn’t click with any of them.
In an almost last-ditch effort, Universal sent her to see a new producer on the scene who was mostly making music for commercials.
Before reinventing himself as a producer Joel Little had been the frontman of the early 2000s pop-punk band Goodnight Nurse. Before going on “indefinite hiatus” in 2010, the band released two Top 5 albums and had a handful of singles pogo into the Top 20, most notably Our Song, a bratty power-punk ballad that became a radio staple.
Joel had set up a small studio named Golden Age with the dream of working with new artists. But his reality was scratching out a living making music for ads along with the odd bit of soundtrack work. Lorde would be one of the first artists to come through his newly opened doors.
“When I met her, we just started hanging out in the studio, and we would listen to a bunch of different music and talk about it, and try out little ideas,” he told the website Songwriter Universe. “And then once we built a bit of trust and a relationship, we started piecing together full songs.”
Having recently “fallen in love” with the moody, minimal sound of electronic artists like James Blake, Jai Paul and Burial — whose mysterious anonymity she’d also borrow, at least initially — Lorde had a very clear idea of the sound she wanted.
“I’m a control freak and want my music to sound 100 per cent the way I want it to,” she said after the album’s release. “I try to create art that means a lot to me, that expresses my emotions. Without seriousness, I’d never create anything I could be truly happy with.”
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Advertise with NZME.In Joel, she’d finally found the perfect collaborator. She would go to the studio with her words and together they’d work on finding the songs within them.
“Lorde always had these amazing lyrics when she came in, and initially, she didn’t really know how to put them into songs,” Joel explained. “I hadn’t really written songs starting with the lyric. But because her lyrics were so amazing, it was a good exercise. I’d ask her, ‘What chords and melody and instrumentation would help strengthen what you’re saying with this lyric?’. And so once we kind of cracked down to that approach, it came together really fast.”
They blocked out a week for recording and came up with three songs, one of which would turn out to be Lorde’s shot at the King. “I’d been kind of thinking about writing that song for a while and been pulling together a couple of little lines here and there, and I had this image from National Geographic of this dude signing baseballs,” Lorde told music site VH1 in 2014. “He was a baseball player and his shirt said ‘Royals’. I was like, I really like that word, because I’m a big word fetishist. I’ll pick a word and I’ll pin an idea to that.”
By all accounts, Royals came together quickly. Lorde told the music industry bible Billboard that she “wrote it in like half an hour, the lyrics, anyway,” before leaving the house to go to the studio one morning.
Talking with The New York Times last year, she described the song as “a moonshot”.
Royals has now been utterly rinsed out. It’s been covered by the likes of Selena Gomez, Jason Derulo, Jack White and Bruce Springsteen, and even survived a conspiracy-infused parody by “Weird Al” Yankovic called Foil. None of that changes the fact that Royals remains an absolute banger, a song you want to turn up every time you hear it.
From the opening second, its sparse production is instantly recognisable. The song shuffles along on not much more than cavernous finger clicks, a hustling kick drum, a throbbing barely-there synth bassline and Lorde’s enigmatic and intriguing vocals.
Impossible to deny or resist, Royals was everywhere. The Guardian called it “the sound of 2013, totally and absolutely, in that way a magic pop song can occasionally take over a year.”
What’s astounding is that Lorde originally gave it away for free, releasing it on her four-track EP The Love Club, on SoundCloud.
“She was 15 at the time, and her approach was, ‘none of my friends have credit cards, no one can buy it’,” Joel explained of the decision to give her music away.
The song gained traction, generating buzz for this mysterious new artist. There was no bio, no photo, no interviews. Just a helluva song and a stylised illustration. Who was Lorde? No one really knew.
With hype building around Royals, Universal stepped in and pulled it from SoundCloud. It was obvious the song was something special. They decided to reissue it as the lead single for Lorde’s debut album Pure Heroine. Powered by Royals the album soared to the top of the charts around the world.
Pure Heroine sold over five million copies, won Album of the Year and Best Pop Album at the New Zealand Music Awards in 2014 and was awarded the Taite Music Prize.
The song Royals won two Grammys (Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance). It was also the first song in 17 years by a female solo artist to top Billboard’s alternative chart and made Lorde the first-ever New Zealand artist to accomplish that same feat.
Pure Heroine is not Lorde’s masterpiece. Three albums into her career that award goes to the giddy highs and emotional lows of her 2017 follow-up Melodrama. But Pure Heroine’s stunning realisation of teenage ennui, its era-defining, moody, minimal art-pop sound and the impact it had around the world, means we can only call the album a Viva Classic.
In her review, The New Zealand Herald’s music critic Lydia Jenkin said of Lorde that “she’s able to write from inside and outside the teenage perspective. The impressive level of self-awareness is what makes her youthful commentary so compelling.” Tastemaker music site Pitchfork hailed the young artist as “a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom”.
Lorde’s music may have kickstarted a new sound in pop but it’s the insight of her lyrics, the relatable realism that drives her literature-inspired storytelling of life as a bored teenager looking for kicks, that gives the album its true power. It makes for an enduring listen that sounds as fresh, exciting and singular today as it did back then.
“Let me be your ruler / You can call me Queen Bee,” Lorde sings in Royals, her delivery confident yet detached. She sounds like she knows the ask is a mere formality and that the world will acquiesce to her claim. “And baby, I’ll rule, I’ll rule, I’ll rule, I’ll rule.”
With Pure Heroine, Lorde took her shot. She went for the King and she did not miss. The King is dead. Long live the Queen.
Pure Heroine is available on CD, vinyl and music streaming services.
