It’s been a long time coming for Lorde to return with new music. After shooting to fame in 2013 with her debut album Pure Heroine in 2013, the now 20 year old New Zealand singer songwriter has finally released the first glimpse of what she’s been up to for the past few years. The new single Green Light is the first completely new and original material we’ve heard from her in a while. Rising to global Fame in 2013, Ella Yelich-O' Connor (aka Lorde) turned a lot of people’s heads in the music world for her incredible songwriting abilities that showed a maturity beyond anything you would’ve expected from a 16 year old. Lorde also caught people's attention due to her refreshing, droll vocal tones and her dark and twisted blend of pop music and electronica. In 2013, the then 16 year old provided a breath of fresh air to the mainstream music industry that appeared to be throughly saturated with formulaic and unoriginal pop records. Each record from the singer songwriter has consistently shown a mixture of hard hitting, self aware and personal songwriting, dark electronic rhythms and punchy bass lines. Yet this new single highlights a new direction for Lorde in a lot of ways. As Ella tweeted herself in preparation for releasing the song: ‘I am so proud of this song. It's very different, and kinda unexpected. It's complex and funny and sad and joyous and it'll make you DANCE’.
The track is noticeably different from her previous works, her voice is not only a touch deeper but the tone of her voice seems a lot more direct and angry. You can tell the lyrics come from a place of personal heartbreak, the conviction and force in which she sings these lyrics albeit to a relatively lighthearted electronic beat further enforces this idea. Listening to the lyrics it becomes increasingly clear Lorde’s music both from the past and now looking into the future will always be used as a vehicle to express her real feelings and personal experiences and that’s something that is rarely seen so openly in the music industry today. In many ways, this new record sees an experimentation and an evolution of Lorde’s well established style she already carved out for herself in her first album. The steady piano chords that form the main hook of the song is something we haven’t heard before much in Lorde’s music. These prominent piano chords mixed with Lorde’s signature cool, quirky vocals rest on rousing electronic beats that rumble underneath the track and provide something different while still remaining recognisably ‘Lorde’. Her decision to include such drastic shifts in tempo within this new single gives further evidence to a consistent theme of difference and unpredictability in Lorde's music. Producing a song with such an offbeat, changeable tempo signals Ella’s continual commitment to offer up something new with every piece of music she creates. Her unique and edgy style of music is what made her entrance into the music industry back in 2013 so innovative and refreshing and it’s good to know that four years down the line with this first sample of her second album ‘Melodrama’ (coming out June this year), her music remains just as bold and original.
Green Light comes from a place of loss and heartbreak but at the same time it’s about the overwhelming sense of freedom that comes with these changes in a person’s life and the rush of possibilities that follow an ending relationship. The track is driven by a jaunty piano riff and soon builds up into a euphoric and cathartic dance driven tune. The chorus itself sounds like something you would hear on a drunken post beak-up girls night out with spectral backing vocals reminiscent of the choirs accompanying Lorde on earlier songs such as Team. The song is a lot more upbeat and poppy which is something we don’t usually hear a lot in Lorde’s music, however the track still features Lorde’s iconic contralto and features the now familiar dark and heavy electronic beats that defined her debut. A follow up tweet from the 20 year old singer songwriter goes on to say: ’It's the first chapter of a story I'm gonna tell you, the story of the last 2 wild, fluorescent years of my life. This is where we begin’. Within the song the lyrics themselves not only tell the personal story of a broken relationship but it also exemplifies Ella’s mastery over the songwriting genre and her ability to incorporate open hearted and often brutally honest lyrics into her music (‘I know about what you did and I wanna scream the truth / She thinks you love the beach, you're such a damn liar’). With a bouncy chorus and slower paced verses that move forward the story of a relationship breaking down, the outro brings us back to everything that we always loved about Lorde as the music fades out with boisterous and grungy synths.
With Lorde lined up for some big festival dates this year, it only makes sense for her new music to head towards a more full bodied, theatrical sound. Based on this first taste of the new record, Lorde has managed to somehow stay true to her roots, giving us a new song to go crazy over that features all the crowd pleasing elements that Lorde is now known for while also giving us something new to chew on. Green Light suggests her music is taking a turn towards the brighter, more mainstream dance genre yet still offers up that dynamic, offbeat edge that we all love her for.
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