TRACK REVIEW: Lorde - Solar Power — Music Musings & Such

TRACK REVIEW:

Lorde

Solar Power

9.7/10

The track, Solar Power, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsP_lzh2-8

GENRE:

Dream Pop

ORIGIN:

Auckland, New Zealand

RELEASE DATE:

10th June, 2021

LABEL:

Universal Music New Zealand Limited

PRODUCERS:

Lorde/Jack Antonoff

__________

I have a lot to cover off…

when talking about Lorde (Ella Yelich-O’Connor). The New Zealand artist released a new single, Solar Power, earlier in the week. It is taken from a forthcoming album of the same now. Though we do not have many details of that, the title track is a brilliant offering. Many people are calling it a ‘return’. I think artists get these label applied when they take some time out to craft material and do not put loads out year after year – like Lorde has been missing in action and has been discovered! To be fair, her second studio album, Melodrama, was released in 2017. It is not as though she has been away all that long. Unsurprisingly, the Internet and social media went mad when she put out a new song. Although not everyone has been sold by Solar Power, it is a song that has received plenty of love. It has arrived when the weather is pretty hot and we need something uplifting and summer-tinged. I will work my way to reviewing the new single, though I want to look back and bring in some interviews where we discover different sides to Lorde. She is in her early-twenties at the moment, so one can forgive the fact she has taken some time to work on her third album. I want to start with an interview that takes us back to when Lorde was young and was turning on to music.

In this 2017 interview from The New York Times, we learn about Lorde’s earliest influences. I discovered a lot of things that I did not know already:

“But sometimes she removed the headphones and let the songs wash over her. She has been fascinated by pop music, relating to it in both intuitive and analytical ways, since early adolescence, when, she has said, she would play tracks by Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado on repeat, trying to figure out their magic. Her taste broadened to include more idiosyncratic sounds, and today she will talk with fervor about Katy Perry one moment, Kate Bush the next. She discusses pop in the language of a zealot and describes “Melodrama” as an act of zealotry. “I have such reverence for the form,” she said. “A lot of musicians think they can do pop, and the ones who don’t succeed are the ones who don’t have the reverence — who think it’s just a dumb version of other music. You need to be awe-struck.”

She brought up “Teenage Dream,” the smash Katy Perry single from 2010, which creates a poignant swirl of lust and nostalgia in under four minutes. “There’s this sadness about it, where you feel young listening to it, but you feel impermanence at the same time,” Lorde said. “When I put that song on, I’m as moved as I am by anything by David Bowie, by Fleetwood Mac, by Neil Young. It lets you feel something you didn’t know you needed to feel.” She regarded me closely. “There’s something holy about it”

PHOTO CREDIT: Arkan Zakharov for FASHION

I have been listening to her new song, Solar Power, a fair bit. Although Lorde herself has spoken about musical inspirations behind it, others have compared the song to other tracks/artists. I think that Lorde is a very original and individual artist. That said, like everyone, there are artists who have compelled her. It is hard to believe that the twenty-four-year-old artist has released so much and been so busy! I do sometimes worry the pressure young artists are under. I might touch on that more later. Going back to that interview from The New York Times. It is interesting reading about Lorde’s musical discoveries and how she came to be signed:

“Lorde, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O’Connor, was born in 1996, the second of four children; her father, Vic O’Connor, is a civil engineer. Her mother, Sonja Yelich, is an award-winning poet whose work has been anthologized multiple times in the “Best New Zealand Poems” series. Ella was a bookish kid. She led her middle-school team to a second-place finish in the 2009 Kids’ Lit Quiz World Finals, a global competition. Shortly afterward, she sat for a morning-show interview on Radio NZ, estimating that she’d read “a bit more than 1,000 books” in her lifetime. She wrote her own fiction too, enamored of Raymond Carver and Kurt Vonnegut. When I asked her to characterize this work, she said only, “It wasn’t very good.” Sonja Yelich told me that when Ella was 14, she proofread Yelich’s 40,000-word master’s thesis: “People said, ‘You’re crazy to entrust this massive undertaking to your child.’ ” (Yelich has routinely accompanied Ella on her travels and is as much confidante as chaperone. You can see her dancing beside Taylor Swift in a 2014 awards-show cutaway as her daughter performs.)

PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Munro for Vogue

Ella joined student musicals and began performing acoustic Amy Winehouse and Kings of Leon covers around Auckland with a friend named Louis, who played guitar while she sang. In August 2009, Louis’s father emailed a recording of the pair performing Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue” to Scott Maclachlan, an A.&R. executive at Universal New Zealand. Maclachlan wasn’t looking for a guitarist, but Ella’s voice intrigued him. He signed her to a development deal and worked, until a couple of years ago, as her manager. He told me that, early on, he “had very traditional A.&R. ideas of finding songs, finding a producer and putting them all together” — but Ella, whose sense of self was too strong to submit to others’ writing, chafed. “After a couple years,” Maclachlan went on, “we got to a point where it was, like, well, write something yourself. So she did. It was a little clunky, arrangement-wise, but the lyrics were really good. And if that’s working, everything else is fixable.” Ella’s precocity helps to explain the wave of Lorde Age Truthers that arose after “Pure Heroine,” with people speculating, tongue only partly in cheek, that she must be a grown woman. In 2014, The Hairpin obtained a birth certificate confirming that Lorde was, as she claimed, a teenager”.

As I have said with a lot of interviews, it is illuminating and important finding out about the artists behind the songs. Rather than simply review Solar Power and leave it there, I wanted to connect more with Lorde and see how this remarkable and immensely popular artists has grown and progressed through the years. Her debut album, Pure Heroine, was released in 2013.

PHOTO CREDIT: Arkan Zakharov for FASHION

There is a great interview that FASHION published in 2017 (the year Melodrama was released). Thinking about how she was signed as a pre-teen and how she went on to discover/working with producer Jack Antonoff makes for fascinating reading:

“Lorde was born to artistic parents and raised in Auckland, New Zealand. After an imaginative childhood, she started singing alongside her guitar-playing friend and posting the songs online. (Interesting fact: To this day, Lorde doesn’t actually play any instruments. “I’m hyper-musical, but I don’t really play anything,” she says. “I write the songs with different chords because I know exactly what I want chord-wise, and then I sing out the chords. I’m very musical, just not in the traditional way, I guess.”) She was discovered when she was 12, and then Universal gave her a development deal.

It’s important to remember here that Lorde is only 20 years old. That means she was 12 in 2009—the heady days of Hannah Montana and the purity-ring-wearing Jonas Brothers. But the young artist didn’t want to sing songs that other people wrote for her. She didn’t want to be manufactured. She resisted and was instead allowed to develop her sound by herself.

That sound, as you imagined earlier, changed everything. Suddenly this shy, introverted, creative teenager—who wrote her first album, Pure Heroine, as a kind of journalistic endeavour chronicling the absurdity of adolescence—was a global phenomenon, complete with famous friends and paparazzi and zany Internet rumours. The success of Pure Heroine could have broken her; Lord knows success has damaged a fair number of talented teens.

But it didn’t, obviously. Lorde kept living her life. That isn’t to say she didn’t learn from the experience, though. “The main thing is that you’re the only one who has to go home and still be you and live with what you’ve done that day,” she says. “And so when it comes to making a decision about something, if people say I should go a certain way, I think, ‘You guys get to go home and take off the hat; I never get to take off the hat.’”

Lorde learned things during her time away from the spotlight, too. Most of them, in some form or another, are what constitute Melodrama. You can hear the life lessons—or at least the journey between experience and life lessons—about heartbreak, the weight fame has on connection and the inconsistent yet palpable thrill of attraction as well as the restless energy of being young and alive. Of course, translating all those lessons into music required some help.

That help mostly came in the form of Jack Antonoff, who, depending on your proximity to hip millennial culture, you might recognize as the guitarist from the band fun., the leader of the band Bleachers or Lena Dunham’s boyfriend. Antonoff and Lorde bonded quickly over a shared willingness to start completely from scratch. The goal was to build her album as if Pure Heroine hadn’t happened. “It was such exploration,” she explains. “The instinct is to assume that I wrote all the lyrics and he did all the production, but sonically this album is so my baby”.

I am going to focus in on Melodrama soon. I want to hook in an interview from The Guardian. Not to tread over the same ground too much. It is worth highlighting what happened to Lorde after Pure Heroine was released and how her life changed:

“After 2014, she pulled back and slowed the pace of her life. She returned to Auckland and bought a house on the water. Ever since she was 13, when a friend sent a tape of her covering a Duffy song to Universal Records in New Zealand and she was signed to a deal, Lorde had been managed by a Universal A&R man called Scott Maclachlan. Post-Pure Heroine, she changed management – a simple case, she insists, “of wanting to poke my nose into different areas”. All of her significant songs up to this point (the four that formed a 2012 EP, The Love Club, and the 10 of her debut album) were co-written with a talented New Zealand songwriter called Joel Little. But Lorde and Little also parted company. These dissolutions were amicable, Lorde insists. “It was really just a case of going where the work needed me to go. It’s hard to have ill-will with that. I’m the nucleus of what’s happening. And I’m going to take that to a lot of places in my career. I don’t think there’s anything strange about that.”

Through 2015, it became trickier for those outside Lorde’s sphere to follow what she was up to. She is not much of a presence on social media (vowing at one point that “all words [will] go into songs instead of tweets”), and though she performed the odd one-off show, provided vocals for a Disclosure track, and worked on the soundtrack for a Hunger Games film, she faded from frontline view. Having been seen and heard by the world, she wanted to resume, as much as possible, her old life with her friends. “Hugs and dinners,” she describes it. “Trips to the beach. Going to dumb bars in the middle of intersections.”

She moved into the waterside house in Auckland on her own. “I come from a big family,” she explains. (Her mother, Sonja Yelich, is a poet and academic, her father, Vic O’Connor, is a civil engineer; Lorde is the second of four siblings.) “We grew up in a house full of love and activity and screaming and crying. When I bought the house, people asked: ‘Isn’t it going to be strange living by yourself?’ And I was like: ‘No! I adore the feeling of being able to spread out my brain.’”

Aware that she couldn’t put off work on her second album for ever, she started assembling notes and ideas on the coffee table in her lounge. This was hastily covered with a towel whenever friends visited: she wasn’t especially proud of the half-formed work. “I was writing about nothing. I wasn’t in the right zone. [These songs] would pass off fine, but they meant nothing to me. I was writing stuff that maybe sounded cool, that were trying to be cool. But they weren’t vividly me”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mary Ellen Matthews

Elle featured Lorde in June 2017. It is another hugely immersive and revealing interview. There are a lot of really wonderful sections of the interview. I was particularly struck by the sections that mention the importance of New York and the connection she and Jack Antonoff share:

“At first, flying back and forth between New Zealand and Los Angeles, she did the dance prescribed to all new pop stardom recruits, going on blind dates with other songwriters and producers, hoping to discover a magical musical connection. But the scene didn't suit. "Everyone's making music in L.A. now—which is great if you aren't the shyest, most introverted nerd," she says, laughing. "I found it a little too social. I made my first record in New Zealand with very little discourse—I was just my own unit. In L.A., it's very, 'Oh, what project are you working on?' I was like, 'I need to be out of this.' " She also needed the right partner in crime, and found one in Jack Antonoff, the Grammy-winning producer and songwriter behind Fun. and Bleachers (and boyfriend of her new pal Lena Dunham), who has worked with Grimes and Taylor Swift, and who cowrote and produced much of Melodrama. And she needed the right city. New York, a place Patti Smith described in 2010 as having become "closed off to the young and struggling," i.e., bereft of real bohemian spirit, provided a sort of counterintuitive blank slate. "There are no musicians here anymore," Ella says. "New York felt like a ghost town musically; it's spooky. It's like a weird pioneer town. And it's cool to be able to rebuild now that everyone is gone."

The city, the collaborative intimacy with Antonoff, the mourning of her teenage self, the breakup—it all combined to allow Ella to hear new sounds again. "I was waiting for that next thing. I knew I wasn't a teenager anymore; I wasn't having those experiences," she says. "Then it was just like this curtain fell, the rain started—all of a sudden, it was an emotion revolution! I was just like, 'Ah fuck, there's all this other shit going on!' " The new sounds she heard were weird. Giant swirls of electronic noise, elaborate melodies, disjointed piano lines leading into dramatic, crescendoing choruses. The lead single, "Green Light," about that moment when you're so close but not quite over someone—"Honey, I'll come get my things but I can't let go / I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it"—is "a very confusing, strange piece of music with insane Euro dance pianos," Ella summarizes. Her team "loved it," but they warned her, "It's going to take people a while to get." Even her rarefied tribe of creatives was worried. "A lot of my friends who make pop music were like, 'It's very complex, there's a lot of parts; people aren't going to get it.' " But Ella trusted her gut—and her fans. "The one mistake people make is when they assume the audience is less intelligent than they are," she says. "I have so much faith in the pop audience, because I am the pop audience. I was like, I know they can handle this, but at the same time I was like, maybe I'm being crazy?”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Seliger

That takes us up to her critically acclaimed second album, Melodrama. Circling back to that interview from The New York Times and it is clear how Pure Heroine put Lorde on the map. It must have been quite daunting trying to following such a notable debut album:

“Lorde owns a house in Auckland, where she grew up, but for the better part of the last year she has been living at different hotels around New York, trying to finish her second album, “Melodrama.” She began writing it about three years ago, first in her childhood home and later at a villa she bought on what she described as the other, fancier side of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbor. Lorde has a neurological condition known as sound-to-color synesthesia — when she hears certain notes and sounds, corresponding colors appear — and she describes making music in intensely visual terms. “From the moment I start something, I can see the finished song, even if it’s far-off and foggy,” she said. Her goal is to correct the colors and sharpen the contours until the precise configuration of chords, rhythms, emotions and textures she has been glimpsing all along snaps into focus. “It’s about getting the actual thing to sound like what I’ve been seeing.”

The album that made Lorde a celebrity, “Pure Heroine,” came out in 2013. It was a marvel of understatement — unhurried electronic beats, pared-down harmonies, empty spaces. Her lyrics brought an unlikely incandescence to avowedly mundane snapshots of suburban teendom. “Pure Heroine” sold more than one million copies in five months, making Lorde the first female artist with a million-selling debut album since Adele and establishing her as a wunderkind pop auteur. Kanye West introduced himself as a fan; Taylor Swift became a buddy; David Bowie clasped Lorde’s hands in his and proclaimed that listening to her music “felt like listening to tomorrow.” The question nagging her here in New York, as she worked to meet the new album’s June release date, was what the day after tomorrow sounded like”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Perou/The Guardian

Melodrama is such a stunning and nuanced album. I went on a dig to see how the album was constructed and came together. That, invariably, takes us back to the interview that The New York Times ran:

“As Lorde worked on “Melodrama” at home in New Zealand, she papered over a wall with notes for songs, like a sleuth tacking up scraps of evidence, trying to tease out their connections and fill in their blanks. This allowed her to “skim the whole album,” she said, and “to make sure I was touching all the bases I wanted to touch: ‘Oh, I haven’t said this, so let me find a good place to do it.’ ” She soon devised color codings for each song, with different hues denoting different themes. “A song about partying would get a certain color,” she explained, “but it might be a sad song, and that got its own color, too.” As she studied the wall, patterns and imbalances emerged: not enough red here; too much yellow there. On her kitchen table she arranged yet more paper, editing and shuffling lyrics around. When friends visited, she hid the table beneath a patchwork of hastily arranged bath towels and instructed them to steer clear.

Pop music has always been a result of teamwork, but in recent years hypercollaborative approaches have become prevalent, with stars bringing legions of contributors to bear on single songs. One writer might provide a vocal melody for a prechorus; another might supply one redolent turn of phrase for the second verse. Lorde’s process is strikingly solitary by contrast. She does not play an instrument, which means she must eventually enlist the help of collaborators, but even then she amasses personnel slowly and sparingly”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Coachella

There is another big interview that gives us some insight into Melodrama and its inspirations. NME spoke with Lorde in 2017. Melodrama’s starting blocks and perspectives are definitely not your run-of-the-mill things!

“Reflecting her disorientating experiences with fame, one of Lorde’s early ideas was to write the album from the perspective of aliens stepping outside of a hermetically sealed environment for the first time. She ended up drawing inspiration from a more familiar source: her friendship group and their interactions (taking “field notes”, as she puts it). “A lot of being in America was about watching people’s faces and realising I didn’t really know what they were saying,” she says. “I would meet American boys and be like, ‘I don’t even think I’m being an accurate version of myself because I’m so confused by who you are.’ A lot of going back to New Zealand is about knowing how to decode people again.”

Lorde invited her gang round to her new house and, well, things got messy. The idea of a house party ended up forming a narrative thread to link the songs, which jacknife through intense, intoxicated highs and slumping lows, hook-ups and break-ups. ‘Melodrama’ captures the wild, wired energy of being young enough that a night out still feels like anything could happen. “I do believe in the transcendent nature of partying, still,” she says.

At the same time, things in the outside world were fast heading south: the refugee crisis, Syria, environmental catastrophe, Trump… An interesting time to be the official voice of the youth. “Oh boy,” says Lorde, rolling her eyes and laughing. “And young people have never needed a specialised spokesperson – one young voice – less than right now… I’ve always known that it’s bulls**t when people would say ‘voice of a generation’. I’d be like, ‘I’m gonna nip it in the bud now… This is not what this is, and it will never be that.’”

‘Melodrama’ is very much a personal statement. “The first record was ‘we’ and ‘us’. And this record is ‘I’,” she says. “The focus does close in. I think that was necessary to get to the level of frankness that’s in there.” And yet the world’s horrors seep in, mixing with the fevered feelings. “I hate the headlines and the weather,” she sings on ‘Perfect Places’. “But when we’re dancing I’m alright.” Recurrent words in the lyrics are “party”, “rush” and “violence”. “It’s about contrast: really big and grand, and really tiny and intimate. Going from the personal, emotional stuff to the headlines and the web. It goes from the world to my bedroom. You’re talking about literal, out-there violence and, like, heart violence”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Perou/The Guardian

Let’s move slightly away from the music and Melodrama. I have read various interviews where the person interviewing Lorde has described how she comes across. Some say she is quite nervous, whereas others have different perspectives. I wanted to raise it, as a lot of people might not know about the woman behind the music. There are a few interviews that I want to highlight. The first, from Elle (which I sourced from earlier), tried to sum up Lorde:

“Face to face, Ella comes across as a poised, gracious, and grounded human being—the kind of person who worries you didn't get enough of the "amazing" maple butter that came with the pancakes. But she also seems a little skittish. When the waiter appears for the third time at an inopportune moment midconversation, jostling her train of thought, you can see the disruption radiate throughout her body. It's hard to reconcile this person with the one a three-second Google image search pulls up: posing for photos with Hailee Steinfeld at Dior; standing in for Kurt Cobain alongside Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic at Nirvana's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction; hanging backstage with Drake and Jaden after Kanye West's 2015 celebrity pomp-fest Yeezy show. How does an artist who says celebrity is fundamentally at odds with her creative process balance the demands of being Lorde with the emotional sanctuary required to be Ella? "New Zealand," she says, eyes stock-still pools of blue. "That's why I am so passionate about going home. Most of my friends are people I knew before I was famous. I'm very thankful that I never feel like the smartest person in the room, or the coolest person in the room, or the funniest. When I'm there, I'm just there. People forget that I've done anything. They say, 'Ella's this weird old dowager with a nice house’”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Davison for The New York Times

It is interesting reading how various interviews describe Lorde and comment about her gestures and interaction. Coming back to the NME interview. They give another perspective regarding an artist who can beguile and impact everyone she meets:

“Lorde, as I’ll learn over the short time we spend together, is very self-deprecating. Clad simply in a dark sweatshirt and trousers, she’s also quick to laugh, eloquent and very down to earth. And of course, she’s also massively famous. In the past four years, she went from teenage songwriter to millennial figurehead. She befriended Taylor Swift, Lena Dunham, Karlie Kloss. She curated a soundtrack for one of her generation’s defining film franchises, The Hunger Games. She made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list of world-shaking young people. She was asked to help induct Nirvana into the Hall of Fame, and then to pay tribute to David Bowie at the BRIT Awards, where Gary Oldman, by way of a no-pressure introduction, announced her as “a young lady who David himself said was the future of music”.

I also want to bring back the great 2017 interview from The Guardian. They provide a commentary about Lorde that I felt warranted a mention:

“Eccentricity was, and remains, central to her appeal as an artist. It seems perfectly right, in the desert today, that her outfit should admit no surrender to the conditions. It’s 99F (37°C) outside, but Lorde wears an oversized black T-shirt, a complicated tangle of necklaces, Adidas Superstars, and blue jeans so wide in the leg that, when she moves about, she has to be supporting about a kilo of denim. “One of my favourite things,” she says slowly, watching me scribble notes about her outfit and no doubt anticipating this paragraph, “is reading in magazines what I wear from the perspective of a male journalist. Always interesting.”

She is like this: relentlessly alert. In conversation, she plunges into new ideas with the enthusiasm of an undergraduate enrolled on her dream course. She searches for the better-expressed phrase or analogy – which isn’t always necessary, because she’s very good off the cuff. (On the difficulty of maintaining a friendship with someone as famous as Taylor Swift: “It’s like having a friend with very specific allergies. There are certain places you can’t go together. Certain things you can’t do. There are these different sets of considerations within the friendship. It’s like having a friend with an autoimmune disease.”) And though her youth finds an outlet, for instance when she agrees with something and yells, “Totally!” or “Truly!”, she expresses herself for the most part with the fluency of someone at least a decade older.

“I’m like an old witch when I talk,” she says, her Kiwi accent flattening certain vowels. “I do meander. But I always come back around”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jess Gleeson

Just before getting to reviewing, I want to return once more to the interview from The Guardian. Although it was conducted four years ago, hearing Lorde discuss her ambitions and aims is wonderful to read:

“There has even been a perverse satisfaction in not being able to win over everyone this time. Lorde is like one of those kids who were slightly too clever at school; they find it difficult to stay motivated when tasks are too simple. So if not everyone has yet been won over by the 2017 incarnation of Lorde, that leaves more winning-over to be done as an incentive for the rest of the year. “I’ve talked to other artist friends about a moment in their careers when they’ve felt themselves stop getting better. So it was almost nice, in a way, to come to this second record and realise: ‘Ooooh, I can still be crap at this.’ It meant there was still so much to learn.” She says she’s come to appreciate that a second album, though an appallingly pressurised thing in the moment, should only be a part of a wider career collage.

“I want to be really, really good one day,” Lorde says. Her legs start to twitch again. Her arms begin to flail, making their shapes. “I think I’m pretty good now. I think I’ve made a good start. But I want to be Paul Simon.” She thumps her hands down hard on the table. “I want to be Leonard Cohen.” (Thump.) “I want to be Joni.” (Thump.) “Fucking.” (Thump.) “Mitchell.” (Thump.) “And that takes time”.

I am going to assess and dissect Solar Power. Lorde herself has revealed the influences behind the song. We also discover which two modern-day queens appear on backing vocals:

“Lorde offered a full breakdown of her long-awaited new single, “Solar Power,” during an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music One Friday, June 11th.

The track, Lorde said, was borne during a summer on Martha’s Vineyard, when she came back from a long day of swimming and began playing around with a Yamaha DX keyboard. She said the melody reminded her of Robby Williams’ song “Rock DJ,” and when she later took the song’s skeleton to producer Jack Antonoff, she set about capturing a distinct summer vibe.

“We had all the windows open. It was summer. And then we just followed it through,” Lorde said. “I sampled cicadas on my phone for the last few summers. I was like, it has to have the cicadas in it. I really wanted to capture [that] there’s something so specific about the New Zealand summer.”

Along with the Robby Williams nod, Lorde cited Primal Scream’s “Loaded” as a major influence on the track. While Lorde said she arrived at the melody organically, she cited the 1990 Madchester classic as “100% the original blueprint for this,” and said Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie even offered his approval.

PHOTO CREDIT: Christoph Gateau/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP

“I wrote the song on the piano and then we realized like, this is, it sounds a lot like ‘Loaded,’” Lorde said. “It’s just one of those crazy things that like, they just were the spiritual forebears of the song. I reached out to Bobby and he was so lovely about it. And he was like, you know, these things happen. You caught a vibe that we caught years ago. And he gave us his blessing.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Lorde spoke about inviting Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo to provide backing vocals on the song, marking the first time she’s had other vocalists sing on one of her songs. “I just knew it had to be a gang,” she said, adding, “the sentiments were not just mine alone to deliver. So yeah, it really it’s everything I hoped it would be in terms of having other people on it. It’s fun not to be alone. Finally.”

And Lorde offered a bit of a teaser for her forthcoming album, saying it, too, was inspired by both a steady process of rejuvenation and New Zealand summers. “I think people realize that about me now, I’m one who has to go away and figure it out and I’ll be back and I’ll bring you a full universe when I come back, but it takes me a minute,” she said. “And I feel like you can hear that in the work and the whole album”.

I love the Solar Power video. Directed by Joel Kefali and Ella Yelich-O’Connor (Lorde), it is such a bold, bright and brilliant video! I think of the song as a call for human connection and a way of distancing ourselves from distractions and technology. The lyrics are definitely among Lorde’s most-quotable and best. Some people have spotted elements of George Michael’s Freedom! ’90 and Primal Scream’s Loaded. In the first verse, Lorde’s voice is huskier and almost whispered. We see her, at first, lying on the beach with some women around her. She gets up as the camera follows her in a single shot. There is a sparseness to the production and vocal which allows for greater impact and a sense of focus. Rather than throw layers and too much in right away, the first verse is quite unadorned and simple: “I hate the winter/Can’t stand the cold/I tend to cancel all the plans (so sorry, I can’t make it)/But when the heat comes/Something takes a hold/Can I kick it? Yeah, I can”. Apart from a nod to A Tribe Called Quest’s song, Can I Kick It, there seems to be more to the lyrics than the weather. On one level, yes, Lorde is embracing the beach and the summer heat. (As a New Zealander, she probably doesn’t experience winters and weather quite like we do here in the U.K.) I also feel there is something personal and more emotion-based to those words. In terms of the visual representation, Lorde seems happy and blissed-out on a sunny beach!

One might expect big electronics and a punchy chorus that injects exploded sun into the veins. The real gift of the song is a sense of anticipation. Lorde keeps things quite chilled and sensuous. There is a quality to her voice that draws you in and compels. The video finds her flitting and dancing about the beach (as the camera has not cut away). We get this single take where the heroine is introducing dancers on the beach (set in this paradise setting). The lyrics are sumptuous, almost carefree yet evocative: “My cheeks in high colour, overripe peaches/No shirt, no shoes, only my features/My boy behind me, he’s taking pictures/Lead the boys and girls onto the beaches/Come one, come all, I’ll tell you my secrets/I’m kinda like a prettier Jesus”. I particularly like that last line. There is wit, colour and arresting scenery to be found through Solar Power. There is a build-up to the 2:00 marker. The video keeps with this single shot, as we see men by the sea with a raft - and Lorde appears alongside a couple of women. I was not expecting the concept we have in the video. I feel it works really well and it is beautifully shot. The fact that Lorde co-directed the video is great. Not cutting away and having too busy a shot means that there is this fluid and calming effect.

PHOTO CREDIT: Universal Music/YouTube

The lyrics, as I have said, are brilliant: “Forget all of the tears that you’ve cried, it’s over (over, over, over)/It’s a new state of mind — are you coming, my baby?”. My favourite lyrics bring colours, the beach and technology together in a beautiful cocktail: “Acid green, aquamarine/The girls are dancing in the sand/And I throw my cellular device in the water/Can you reach me? No, you can’t”. Before coming to the turning point in the song, there are lines that made me wonder as to their meaning: “Turn it on in a new kind of bright, it’s solar (solar, solar, solar)/Come on and let the bliss begin/Blink three times when you feel it kickin’ in/That solar power”. The chorus sees Lorde joined by the full cast in a line as she grooves and dances seductively on the beach. I love the vibe of the chorus! There is something exotic, tender and swooning about it. Lorde elongates the song’s title and creates this warm and calming wave. It is a change of sound to the verse, and it provides this sensation that is part sun-kissed, part moonlit. With a light beat behind her, one feels island vibes and this incredibly pleasing sensation. I cannot fathom or understand those who have dismissed the song or felt disappointed by it! Maybe they were expecting something banging and fully-charged. Instead, we get a song that is perfect for the summer. It is a great introduction to the Solar Power album! I have listened to the song numerous times. Whilst I love it all, it is that chorus that I keep coming back to. The video looks gorgeous. Lorde herself looks beautiful and super-cool. It is a feast for the ears and eyes! The blissful and insatiably beautiful chorus rides to the end. It is the perfect end to a triumphant and stunning single from Lorde. I cannot wait to see what the Solar Power album offers!

Before closing things up, I am bringing in an article where Lorde talked more about the Solar Power album and what we might expect:

“The decade-defining artist confirmed that ‘Solar Power’ is the title track from her hugely anticipated third album (no release date or title yet) and says the sun-kissed tune is the perfect introduction to what comes next.

“Every song on the album, I did say it has to sound like the sun, and this one in a big way. It sounds like the beach, the waves, the girls lying on the beach. I really wanted it to have that vibe. The guitars, the drums – everything’s so sunny.”

Despite what’s been “a pretty wild [year] for everyone”, Lorde has been trying to spent a lot more of her time in nature and her time outdoors has heavily impacted the sound and themes of the new album.

“It’s definitely my most complex work – as a producer, as an arranger, as a musician. But I also love how light, playful, and fun it is."

"I hope it makes people go outside and really just get out there and listen to what the natural world has to tell them. That's my goal for this [album]."

COVID forced her indoors for a while, just like everyone else, but "I try and spend all of my time that I can outside, wherever that is."

"I have a variety of secret spots that I go to. But I also spend a tonne of time in the studio. I was in New York with Jack [Antonoff, producer] working on this stuff last summer. So, between the studio and a perfect beach somewhere, that’s kind of my vibe.”

She's even made use of the sun and the sand for the 'Solar Power' video, capturing that "infectious, flirtatious energy that starts to come [in summer]." And there's more where that came from.

“We made a whole bunch of videos for this album,” Lorde explained. “We built literally basically a universe on a secret beach. The first video is me introducing you to the world of the album and the videos, I play a kooky tour guide almost.”

And yes, she’s also seen the reactions that flooded social media when the mASSterful ‘Solar Power’ artwork was unleashed earlier this week”.

I am looking forward to a third studio album from one of the finest artists of this generation. As people have labelled Solar Power as a ‘return’, maybe there is that pressure on Lorde to excel and deliver something even more astounding than Melodrama. If the title track is anything to go on, she is moving in a different musical direction. Most artists evolve, though I am particularly curious about Lorde and what she will deliver on Solar Power. It must rank alongside the most-anticipated albums of 2021 – I assume that it will come out later this year? Solar Power is another remarkable song from…