Lorde - Green Light

Lorde disappointed people with Green Light. With her debut album, Pure Heroine, she was seen as this over achieving teenager that came from a remote unexpected country and made it to the big leagues by rejecting the topics that other pop stars recycle in every song, she gave voice to millions of teenagers that felt that their lives weren't related to Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, she was a real human being, not a manufactured robot, talking about everyday life.

Cut to four years later, and the first song that we get from her sophomore album is something that people never expected from her: a song that you can dance to, and to make it even more drastic: it's about a breakup. And people got upset, almost as if she was betraying them now that she hangs with top celebrities. How does she dare to stop being gloom and put on the dance shoes? How does she dare to fall in love? As if the idea of the strong independent woman was in conflict with being in love and having fun. And in this rejection to new possibilities for Lorde, they are missing one of the best dance pop songs in years,

In any case, this is not your average breakup song, when approached by of one of the smartest lyricist in her generation, this moment that feels colosal to everybody, for her is resumed on how minimal things (the lover making believe the new girlfriend that he likes the beach) are the ones that break the heart most that the actual separation, and she is also very aware of her new position of pop superstar, so when she pens "I whisper things, the city sings 'em back to you", she wants to make sure that whenever this guy goes to a bar in Auckland (and probably anywhere in the western world), he won't be able to escape what he did, because the DJs and the partygoers will have this track playing for a long time. But there's a sense of new possibilities floating all along the song, when she sings about hearing brand new sounds in her mind, the song shifts and we listen how a house piano (yes, this is a new sound in Lorde's music) starts building the tension that only explodes when she cries about waiting for the Green Light, a synesthetic symbol for freedom and redemption. She hasn't got over that break-up, but she knows that putting it into her music will be cathartic, and one day, after singing it every night all around the world, she'll be finally free and she'll get another green light to move over, just like she did with her sound.

By embracing her new style, we don't do her a favor (does she really strikes you as the girl that will panic if she don't top the charts?), we do it to ourselves, because right now she is adding new elements to dance pop history, so let's just jump in her revolution because with Green Light she's assuring us that she's very able to write about love (or the lack of it) and doing it without clichés and common places.