(EMI)
Like Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift before her, the New Zealand star embraces mellowness on a third album shaded by climate anxiety and a rejection of celebrity
Sometimes, Solar Power – Lorde’s long-awaited third album – feels like the polar opposite of her second, 2017’s Melodrama: it is filled with calm, sun-kissed serenity. Over 12 outdoorsy but often inward-looking tracks, the 24-year-old New Zealand pop sensation seems to bid adieu to the toxic and the fraught, the garish and the busy. If the mood of the album’s title track – and its eye-catching video, in which dancers gyrate cultishly around Lorde’s “prettier Jesus” – felt tremendously beach-ready, the rest of Solar Power is dappled with late-afternoon shade. The album’s pace never really recaptures the Primal Scream vibes of the single.
But the album is not much poorer for this equanimity, with its former teen star, elevated to instant mega-fame in the 2010s, pondering past lives, present happiness and future uncertainty with some deft writing, a gauzy feel and the odd Beatles melody. The drums are a kit, not a program; there are susurrations and New York sirens lurking within the production, lending depth and breadth.