It shares their back-to-nature-ethos their mood of recumbent contentment their tendency to deal in homespun wisdom. She draws from an eclectic range of musical inspirations – Primal Scream kindly declined to call their lawyers over the title track’s obvious resemblance to their single Loaded, and she’s presumably the first pop star in history to suggest Robbie Williams’ Rock DJ as a big influence – but what Solar Power really recalls, at least spiritually, is the rash of albums by artists who followed the example of Steve Winwood’s band Traffic, and uncoupled themselves from the dizzying whirl of mid-60s pop to move to Berkshire or Wales or Scotland in order to get it together in the country. There’s a knowing wink about the title of Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen It All) the distinct sense that she knows the guy she mocks in Dominoes – forgoing cocaine for yoga and wellness – doesn’t seem a million miles removed from her. To her credit, Lorde seems to realise that, undercutting her sermonising with a selection of metaphorical cocked eyebrows and sly looks to camera: “I’m kinda like a prettier Jesus”, “maybe I’m just stoned”. Skinning up on a beach all day is doubtless better than working, but it’s not really an option if you’re not absolutely minted. To which the obvious response might be: well, that’s easy for you to say. So does Solar Power, but rather than a source of frustration, it depicts New Zealand’s remoteness as an asset: a place you can escape celebrity in favour of a life that, as far as can be gathered, consists largely of smoking weed and sunbathing. Pure Heroine painted her home in New Zealand as impossibly remote, filled with “cities you’ll never see onscreen”. The surprise is that her journey turned out to be a round trip. Oceanic Feeling depicts the “cherry black lipstick” that formed part of Lorde’s old image “gathering dust in a drawer”, while California dismisses the hedonism that Solar Power’s predecessor, 2017’s Melodrama, positively revelled in: “goodbye to all the bottles, all the models … it’s all just a dream, I want to wake up.” Clearly Lorde has been on quite a journey in the eight years since her debut album, although it would be more shocking if she hadn’t: she was, after all, only 16 when she released Pure Heroine, with its global No 1 hit single Royals. On the title track, she chucks her mobile in the sea. It’s a theme Solar Power frequently returns to. “If you’re looking for a saviour,” she adds, “that’s not me”, which would sound a little self-aggrandising had the world of online fandom not become so overheated that whenever a female pop star posts anything on social media, the responses are clogged up by stans calling them “mum”, “queen” and “goddess”. A flute glides beatifically by and Lorde offers a grim depiction of life as a teenager superstar – complete with “nightmares from the camera flash” – before apparently saying goodbye to all that: “alone on a windswept island”, she “won’t take the call if it’s the label or radio”. It opens with a guitar picking a gentle, woozy-sounding figure.
They’ve tried everything to achieve their goal, from making deliberately unlistenable albums, to – in the memorable case of the late Scott Walker – locking themselves in a monastery on the Isle of Wight.īut few have attempted to bid farewell to mainstream pop stardom as prettily as Lorde does on her third album. P lenty of mainstream pop stars have decided they no longer want to be mainstream pop stars.
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