All pop sells a fantasy, and Lordeās music is no different. What sets it apart is the peculiar quality of the fantasy on offer: Itās the fantasy of escaping from pop, or at the very least the gaudier images and baser longings associated with it. āRoyals,ā the song that launched her career, traces her preferred movement: a disengagement from the excesses of pop (āGold teeth, Grey Goose, tripping in the bathroom, bloodstains, ball gowns, trashing the hotel roomā) into a drive toward a relationship whose privacy is a proof of its authenticity. In place of the sprawling court of pop kings and queens, she sets out the vision of a court, and courtship, composed of only two, alone together.
Some ambivalence persists: the ājet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leashā are described with more precision than complete distaste would permit. When she concludes her chorus with āLet me live that fantasy,ā itās hard not to think that the fantasy the singer strives for wasnāt quite as simple or limited as the thought of two lovers getting away from the maddening crowd. Royalty isnāt possible without masses of onlookers: Lordeās genius on āRoyalsā and Pure Heroine was to crown herself a pop princess by pretending it was easy.
Though charming as a debut, repeating the act wouldnāt just be dishonest, but tacky and stunted as well; thankfully, Lordeās second album, Melodrama, demonstrates that sheās sharp enough to move on to new tones and perspectives. Instead of longing after a budding romance, sheās looking back on one fading or recently past. The stateliness of Pure Heroine has given way to partial dishevelment; that collectionās sparse, icy arrangements have yielded to warmer, more danceable, and more dynamic arrays of sound and feeling, as exemplified by āSupercut,ā Melodramaās best track.
The basic structure of āRoyalsā remains largely intact: elaboration of an image, followed by immersion, followed by a pulling away, and once again the image is framed by pop machinery ā the cinematic montage of the title, a radio turned up, continents and cars, stages and stars. But itās personal experience, not pop-star luxury, that forms the image itself; the drama of the song is driven not by thoughts of public stature, but of private loss.
Joined to production at once pulsing and rippling, the backward-gazing lyrics generate a sense of compulsive agony over loveās end that somehow feels as giddy as its beginning, and consequently twice as wrenching. As Feist, with whom Lorde has much in common, once put it, āthe saddest part of a broken heart isnāt the ending so much as the start.ā The fantasy of āSupercutā is born from memory: Love was real, and now itās really over, and itās time to write a song people can shed tears to in the club. Itās fitting that the song will be a single to remember for a long time to come.