Melodrama is the second studio album by New Zealand singer Lorde, released through Universal Music on 16 June 2017. A departure from the minimalist style of Lorde's debut album Pure Heroine, it is an electropop album incorporating piano instrumentation and maximalist electronic beats. It was produced by Lorde, Jack Antonoff and several high-profile producers including Frank Dukes, Flume, Malay, S1 and Joel Little.
The album, which was recorded after Lorde's relationship with her long-time boyfriend James Lowe broke down in 2015, has been described as a loose concept album that explores the theme of solitude. It follows the framework of a single house party, and the events and moods that ensue. During her writing sessions, Lorde flew between the United States and New Zealand several times, examining the world around her. She continued working through "false starts, fruitless detours and stretches of inactivity" as she retreated from the public spotlight.
The lead single, "Green Light", was followed by two more singles; "Perfect Places" and a remix of "Homemade Dynamite". The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling 109,000 album-equivalent units, topping the charts in three other markets. Melodrama received widespread acclaim from critics, many of whom commended its songwriting, production and Lorde's vocal delivery. It was named as the best album of the year by several publications and received a Grammy Award nomination for Album of the Year at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards.
Video Melodrama (Lorde album)
Background and recording
In December 2013, Lorde announced that she had begun writing material for her second studio album. The following year, she said her second studio album was in its early stages and that at that stage it was "totally different" from her debut album; She also said the shift in sound were due to the change in circumstances and settings of her life. Later in 2014, Lionsgate Entertainment announced that Lorde would curate the soundtrack for the third installment of The Hunger Games franchise, which would be followed by the release of the film's lead single "Yellow Flicker Beat" to critical acclaim. In an interview with Australia's Triple J radio network in February 2015, Joel Little, who produced Pure Heroine (2013), said he was scheduled to join Lorde for a writing session in a recording studio the following month. Little also said a definite plan was not yet established. More than a year later, he said that although he wrote a few songs for the album, he would not serve as an executive producer, attributing this to Lorde "trying to do something different". Lorde was eventually featured on Disclosure's track "Magnets" which appears on the duo's 2015 album Caracal.
In January 2016, The New Zealand Herald reported that Lorde and James Lowe, her boyfriend of three years, had ended their relationship. The singer confirmed the break-up during interviews following the release of "Green Light" (2017). Lorde said she indulged in "heavy drinking" and noticed there was an "element of escapism and exploration" in doing so; she wanted to be herself in strange situations to see the reactions afterwards. She was chosen to perform "Life on Mars" (1971) at the 2016 Brit Awards as part of a David Bowie tribute. Lorde replied to a comment on her Instagram account in late August 2016 that she completed the writing process of Melodrama and that she was in the production stages. The singer announced its title on 2 March 2017. She began posting pictures of herself in Electric Lady Studios with Jack Antonoff on social media taken in and after December 2015. The duo recorded for 18 months.
Melodrama was released through Lava Records and Republic Records on 16 June 2017.
Maps Melodrama (Lorde album)
Writing and production
Lorde said that during the early stages of writing content for Melodrama, she imagined writing the album from the perspective of aliens stepping outside a hermetically sealed environment for the first time, citing the science fiction short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950) by Ray Bradbury as inspiration. She scrapped the idea and chose instead to write about her own struggles with the early stages of adulthood. She likened the plot of the short story to her own reality, stating that she would usually hide at her house with friends, "drinking and making a concerted effort to block out the rest of the world, as if there'd been some sort of nuclear fallout". In her view, the past two years were very "turbulent and traumatic" that it made the climate feel so "tangible". Lorde also took notes from conversations with her friends and said that while in the United States, she would watch people's faces and not know what the other person was saying. Returning to New Zealand meant she had to "decode people again."
Melodrama is about a "grapple with loneliness" in the aftermath of a break-up, according to The New York Times. In the article, Lorde says Melodrama is not simply a "breakup album" but is rather a "record about being alone"; it features both the favourable and unfavourable aspects associated with "heartbreak and solitude". She did, however, call "Green Light" a traditional break-up song. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Lorde said the title of the album is a "nod to the types of emotions you experience when you're 19 or 20". She said the previous two years were intense for her, and that she experienced a wide range of emotions. Lorde also said she had a "love of theater" and drawing parallels with Greek tragedies. She said it was very "tongue-in-cheek" to name her record Melodrama. The singer compared the album and Pure Heroine, saying this record felt more stylized because it is a "collection of moments, thoughts, and vignettes". According to Lorde, she had to deal with "very serious, vivid feelings" she needed to express after experiencing her first heartbreak and moving out of her parents' home, and she spent time isolated in her own house. Working with Antonoff helped her open up about her inner situation.
While writing content for the album, Lorde took inspiration from a number of settings and tested new material by listening to demos through earphones at a diner near Columbus Circle, which she did for about four months to understand how the music would sound in everyday life. She took inspiration from strangers' conversations; she said she would often hear certain phrases that she would think about for hours. These phrases also came through in the form of a "tableau". The diner usually played top 40 radio, which she said would occasionally distract her from writing, although she sometimes removed her headphones to let the songs "wash over" her. At a rental house she owned on remote Waiheke Island, Lorde had a wall of notes for her songs, which she used to "skim" the whole album; it allowed her to find connections to each track and "fill in their blanks". Each song was colour coded because of her sound-to-colour synesthesia; Lorde arranged the colours according to its theme and emotion.
Artwork
The cover art for Melodrama was painted by American abstract painter Sam McKinniss, with whom Lorde had communicated by email. The pair agreed to meet and started discussing a collaboration. Lorde later visited McKinniss' studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she took a liking to a full-figure portrait of the cover photograph of Prince's 1984 album Purple Rain and a painting of Lil' Kim. Lorde asked McKinniss to create a painting with a "kind of colorful teenage restlessness and excitement and energy and potential".
McKinniss and Lorde met in late 2016 at his friend's studio. His studio set consisted of coloured bulbs on a lighting rig and a space with several windows. Lorde wore a vintage negligee and posed for two hours. According to McKinniss, the album art is the "converging of two like minds" and "simpatico spirits". He said Lorde told him; "I want to be a teen-ager in my bedroom after a long night, at daybreak". The pair considered making the photography session "operatic" and pre-Raphaelite-inspired, but scrapped the idea because they were satisfied with Lorde's facial expressions on the resulting images. McKinniss made two paintings from his photographs; one featured a blue glow with a warm flush on Lorde's cheek and the other has different lighting, with "paler, sweeter" colours. The unused painting was later revealed in an interview McKinniss did for Dazed.
NME placed the cover on their list of the best album art of the 21st century so far. Paste ranked it at number 11 in their year-end list for album covers, and it also appeared on Billboard's unranked list. Tatiano Cirisano said McKinniss "perfectly communicates the intimacy and coming-of-age storyline" of the record with its "hazy twilight hues and bedside setting". Fuse also ranked the cover in their year-end list.
Music and lyrics
Lorde's vocals on Melodrama have been noted for her emotional and layered delivery. She cites the emotional vocals of Kate Bush and Sinéad O'Connor, and Laurie Anderson's use of the vocoder as inspiration for her vocal delivery on the album. The Daily Telegraph writer Neil McCormick described Lorde's vocals as "audacious singing, which locates different levels of intimacy in different vocal timbres, multi-tracking her voice so that it often sounds like songs are being delivered by competing versions of herself". Her vocals range from "witchy, unprocessed low-register warbles" to "digitized masks". According to NME, different personae of Lorde, ranging from the "strong, composed young woman" to the hidden "psycho", are present in her vocal performances on the album.
Melodrama is built around Antonoff's signature production, which incorporates drums, synths, layered vocals and straightforward hooks. Lorde and Antonoff met in early 2014 at a Grammy after-party. They later had several "exploratory" writing sessions, after which Lorde hiring him as the main co-writer on the album. Lorde worked on Melodrama in Antonoff's Rough Customer Studios in New York City and at her home in New Zealand. The song structures on the record are traditional in construction, with piano-based melodies in contrast with the hip-hop influences on Lorde's first album. Lorde took a classicist approach, usually finding a melody in her mind then trying different vocal falsettos; Lorde said that because of this, the whole album can be played in acoustic form. Lorde wanted to explore a "cathartic mode" for the album. Several publications noted its maximalist pop production, a departure from the singer's signature minimalist style. Melodrama has been described by critics as a pop and electropop album.
The album's lyrics are about heartbreak, solitude and loneliness. Though it has been denied by Lorde, music critics have described Melodrama as a loose concept album. Lorde has stated Melodrama has only a loose narrative; she believed in the "transcendent nature" that partying can bring, with the intense "intoxicated highs and slumping lows", hook-ups and break-ups helping to form a narrative thread that connected each song.
Lorde developed a disdain for the phrase "voice of a generation"; according to her, the album's shift in narrative focuses on "I" in contrast with Pure Heroine's inclusion of "we" and "us". The words "party", "rush" and "violence" recur throughout the record. Lorde wanted to showcase some contrast, going from "big and grand" to "really tiny and intimate", and to include personal events, headlines and themes associated with the World Wide Web. She drew inspiration from Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland, calling it "somewhere we hope we're headed" and comparing it with Miley Cyrus' song "Malibu" (2017), saying "[h]ow lovely that first love is Malibu, and Graceland is enlightenment after love lost". Lorde uses numerous metaphors on Melodrama, such as the teeth of great white sharks, continuing her incorporation of teeth in her lyrics. Lorde also cites Don Henley, Tom Petty, Phil Collins and Joni Mitchell as inspirations.
Songs
Tracks 1-5
The album's opening track "Green Light" features titular metaphors; reviewers interpreted the "green light" as a street signal that gives the singer permission to move into the future. It was described by critics as an electropop, dance-pop, and post-disco song. Lorde was inspired to write the track after attending a Florence and the Machine concert with Antonoff; the writing process took her 18 months to complete. She said the piano line in the song resembles the piano introduction on The National's 2008 song "Fake Empire". "Sober", which was formed using a bongo drum, was written after Lorde went to Coachella. The track's instrumentation also includes a tenor and baritone saxophone and a trumpet. The sound of a tiger's roar, which was added two sessions before the song concluded when Antonoff was looking through samples.
Lorde co-wrote "Homemade Dynamite" with Tove Lo and is the only song for which Antonoff is not credited as songwriter or producer. Lorde was inspired to write "The Louvre" after listening to Frank Ocean's 2016 album Blonde; she said she could have made a "big, easy single" but refrained from doing so because she felt it would not mean much to "simplify the journey" or "force a big chorus". She said that the production process was "exciting", stating, "I can use guitars and I can get a big gnarly Flume beat and throw it under water." According to Newsweek, the singer's cadence in some lines almost turns into rapping, which was compared with cross-genre music. "Liability" is the first piano ballad on the album; in a profile with The Spinoff, Lorde said the song's chords felt "classic" and similar to the works of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Don Henley. She was inspired when she took a taxi from a party and listened to the track "Higher" from Rihanna's 2016 album Anti.
Tracks 6-11
The first part of "Hard Feelings/Loveless" uses a distorted synthesizer and elements of industrial, noise and electronica genres. Antonoff said one of his proudest moments while producing the album was the placing of a "synth at the end [of the song] that sounds like metal bending". The first two lines of "Loveless"--"What is this tape? / This is my favorite tape"--were sampled from a documentary about Paul Simon's album Graceland Lorde watched. The drum solo used as the transition instrument linking "Hard Feelings" to "Loveless" was sampled from Phil Collins' 1981 song "In the Air Tonight". Lorde stated this was one of the earliest tracks on the record. She often listened to the soft rock music of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Fleetwood Mac and Paul Simon while riding the subways in New York City and taking cab rides home from parties in Auckland. Lorde and Antonoff both compared the song to Don Henley's "The Heart of the Matter" (1989). Antonoff also likened its message to Henley's song because both songs "grapple with news that a past lover has met someone new, then laments other bygone relationships".
The following track, "Sober II (Melodrama)", a continuation of "Sober", is sung from the perspective of a "deflated room". The song was originally titled "Sober (Interlude)" before its release. Comparing Lorde with Kate Bush, Claire Schafer of Newsweek said "[t]he heartwrenching chorus of 'Writer in the Dark' [...] is uncannily similar to Bush's high register and otherworldly excess of feeling", and that Melodrama "marks a new dimension to Lorde's voice, where every little breath and enunciation carries enormous meaning". Lorde woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down the main theme of the song, feeling naughty and empowered while doing so. To her, it was a "cool, painful moment" on the record. Lorde said "Supercut" is the only song on the album in which she speaks to someone, describing the thought process as the Eleventh Hour. Most of the song was constructed using drums and then she "filled in the blanks" with the piano. She considered turning "Liability (Reprise)" into an a cappella track before deciding to "be sensible" and adding a backing beat. "Perfect Places" was inspired after the deaths of David Bowie and Prince, two musicians whom Lorde states were her main inspirations while recording Melodrama.
Release and promotion
Lorde first promoted her forthcoming album by posting a link to a website called imwaitingforit.com to her Twitter account. The website featured a short video clip of Lorde sitting in a car while eating and drinking while a piano-backed track played in the background; this was followed with the dates "3.2.17 NYC" and "3.3.17 NZ". The video was titled "M" followed by seven asterisks and ending with "A", which would later be revealed as the album's name. According to Fact magazine, the clip was also broadcast on New Zealand's major television channels. The singer promoted her first single by broadcasting the locations of three mysterious art installations in Auckland; an abandoned car illuminated with green light, a projection screen lit in green that showed a five-second music video clip and a neon sign depicting song lyrics.
On 10 March 2017, a week before the release of the album's lead single, Lorde released "Liability" as the first promotional single. The next day, she performed "Liability" and "Green Light" on Saturday Night Live for the first time; this was her first performance in over two years. Lorde's performance gained positive reviews from critics. She debuted two new songs, "Sober" and "Sober II (Melodrama)", at a "tiny pre-Coachella gig" held at Pappy & Harriet's on 15 April. "Sober" was announced as the album's second promotional single on 9 June. She debuted "Homemade Dynamite" during her set at Coachella the next day. Critics called her set one of the highlights of the festival. Lorde also performed "Green Light" at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards on 21 May on a set that included "a cheap karaoke lounge, with red lighting, a dingy couch, impassive friends and an old TV that spat out song lyrics in blocky lettering". Her performance was met with positive reviews from critics.
Lorde released "Perfect Places" as the album's second single on 1 June 2017. She first performed the song live with Jack Antonoff as part of her set at the Governors Ball Music Festival. On 30 July, Lorde performed at the Fuji Rock Festival in Niigata, Japan. She released "Homemade Dynamite" as the third single from the album after performing an interpretive dance to the song at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards. Her performance was met with mixed reviews from critics, some of whom called it "bizarre". Her decision to not sing came after she was diagnosed with influenza. Lorde then released a remix of "Homemade Dynamite" that featured guest vocals by Khalid, Post Malone and SZA on 14 September 2017. To further promote the album, Lorde embarked on a world tour with several opening acts; she announced the tour in June 2017. The tour began at the O2 Apollo Manchester in England on 26 September 2017 and ended on 19 October 2017 in Trondheim, Norway. The Oceania leg consisted of 13 dates. Lorde will play an additional 30 shows in North America, including two dates in Toronto and Vancouver stating on 1 March 2018.
Singles
On 2 March 2017, Lorde announced the album's title via Twitter while releasing the lead single "Green Light" and its accompanying music video. The track received acclaim from music critics, many of whom included "Green Light" in their respective year-end lists. The song peaked at number one in New Zealand and at number 20 in the United Kingdom. On the Billboard Hot 100, "Green Light" peaked at number 19, becoming her third top-20 hit in the United States since "Team" in 2013. The single reached number 9 on the Canadian Hot 100, earning Lorde her third top-ten hit there. It was commercially successful, earning a Platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and a triple-Platinum certification from the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA).
"Perfect Places" was released as the second single on 1 June 2017, while its accompanying music video was released on 3 August 2017. It was released to American modern rock radio on 6 June 2017 as the album's second official single. On 12 June 2017, "Perfect Places" debuted at number 11 on the New Zealand Top 40 , becoming Lorde's twelfth chart entry in New Zealand. Two months later, Lorde teased a track on Instagram after the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, with a caption consisting of 21 asterisks. This was an announcement of a remix of "Homemade Dynamite" that featured vocals from Khalid, Post Malone and SZA, and was released on 14 September 2017. The song debuted at number 92 on the Billboard Hot 100. Since its release, "Homemade Dynamite" has received a platinum certification from Music Canada (MC) and a gold certification from Recorded Music NZ for shipments of 80,000 and 15,000, respectively.
Reception
Following the album's release, it debuted at number one in New Zealand, Australia and the United States, becoming Lorde's first US number-one album where it entered the Billboard 200 with 109,000 album-equivalent units, including 82,000 album sales. It was also her first number-one album in Canada, entering the Canadian Albums Chart and selling 12,000 album-equivalent units. The album dropped to number 13 in the US the following week. Melodrama debuted at number one in Australia with first-week sales of 12,001. It entered the UK Albums Chart at number five, selling 17,026 copies in its first week.
Melodrama received widespread acclaim from music critics, many of whom commended its production, Lorde's writing and vocal delivery, and the album's themes. At review aggregate site Metacritic, Melodrama has an average score of 91 out of 100, based on 33 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine gave the album a rating of 4.5 stars out of 5, saying "[Melodrama] simmers and builds from track to track, loaded with unlikely hooks" and "whether it's a party record disguised as a breakup album or a breakup album disguised as a party record, it's cathartic, dramatic, and everything else you could want an album titled Melodrama to be". Will Hermes of Rolling Stone rated the album 4 stars out of 5, stating, "Lorde's writing and fantastically intimate vocals, ranging from her witchy, unprocessed low-register warbles to all sorts of digitized masks, make it matter".
Nolan Feeney of Entertainment Weekly gave the album a rating of 'A' and wrote, "Lorde makes partying sound holy" and that "the shape-shifting compositions give Melodrama a richer, more dynamic palette than the muted, minimalist beats of Pure Heroine". Feeney also said, "The tracks are in constant dialogue with themselves: Motifs of riding in cars and the "ribbons" that bind her to a lover repeat throughout the album, adding layers to the story". According to Pitchfork writer Stacey Anderson, "Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom."
Writing for Drowned in Sound, Joe Goggins stated; "[Lorde] is intensely self-aware and, accordingly, is able to take all the inelegancies of youth--the stumbles out of nightclub doors, the clothes strewn across the bedroom floor, how apocalyptic that first heartbreak feels--and turn them into something exquisite". Kitty Empire of the Guardian said the album is balances the pull between commercial pressures and Lorde's artistry, "yielding glossy ear-crack that will burn its way through Spotify playlists, while retaining [Lorde's] signatures: her smeary husk of a voice, her gimlet eye, her outsider's viewpoint". Empire also said Lorde has grown from the minimalist aesthetic in her debut album and that the themes of fame, heartbreak, partying and self-analysis were well handled in Melodrama. NME named the album its 2017 Album of the Year.
Accolades
Melodrama appeared on numerous year-end top albums lists. Many media sources, including Consequence of Sound, Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Weekly, The Mercury News, No Ripcord, NME, Pretty Much Amazing, Stereogum and Uproxx, named it the best album of 2017. It was voted as fourth best album in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll for 2017, with a score of 724 points. The single "Green Light" was voted in the top-10 of the Pazz & Jop's singles list. Metacritic, which collates reviews of music albums, named Melodrama the third best-reviewed album of 2017, behind Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me (2017) and Kendrick Lamar's Damn (2017). It was one of three albums to score above a 90 on the site. Metacritic also placed it as the second most prominently ranked record of 2017, at 122.5 points. Melodrama was nominated for Album of the Year at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards but the award went to Bruno Mars' 24K Magic (2016).
Several publications, including The Independent, Interview, The New Zealand Herald, PopMatters, The Ringer and Rolling Stone, included Melodrama as the runner-up in their respective year-end lists. A number of other publications, including BBC News, Billboard, Highsnobiety, New York Daily News, Newsday, People, Pigeons and Planes, The Skinny, ABC News, Dazed, Exclaim!, The Guardian, Q, Spin, The Daily Beast, Mashable, NPR, Pitchfork, Time, Vinyl Me, Please and Yahoo!, ranked the record within the top five. Other publications who included Melodrama in their year-end lists include Fuse, Genius, Loud and Quiet, Slant, Sputnikmusic, State, Time Out, Tiny Mix Tapes, Uncut, Vice and Vulture. The New York Times editors Jon Caramanica and Jon Pareles ranked the album at numbers 7 and 10 in their respective lists. Publications that included the album outside of the top ten of their year-end lists include The A.V. Club, Complex, Drowned in Sound, The Line of Best Fit, Spectrum Culture, and Under the Radar while AllMusic, The Alternative, The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, The Nation, Newsweek, The Stranger, The Sydney Morning Herald, USA Today V and Variety placed the album in their un-ranked lists. Rolling Stone and PopMatters included Melodrama in their pop category year-end lists, ranking seventh and first, respectively. Kitty Empire from The Observer and Carl Wilson from Slate included Melodrama in their un-ranked lists.
Grammy Awards
Lorde was the only woman to be nominated in the Album of the Year category at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards. A day before the event, it was reported that Lorde declined to perform at the ceremony after being asked to perform with other acts. Her decision to protest came after the other nominees, who were all male, were given the opportunity to perform by themselves. An article published by Variety reported that The Recording Academy approached Lorde about performing with other artists. She was asked to take part in a tribute to Tom Petty involving his song "American Girl" (1976).
Track listing
Notes
- ^[a] signifies an additional producer
- ^[b] signifies a vocal producer
- ^[c] signifies an additional vocal producer
- ^[d] added to the album after the single's release
Personnel
Credits adapted from the liner notes of Melodrama.
Production
Engineering
Design and management
Charts
Certifications and sales
Release history
See also
- List of Billboard 200 number-one albums of 2017
- List of number-one albums from the 2010s (New Zealand)
- List of number-one albums in New Zealand by New Zealand artists
- List of number-one albums of 2017 (Australia)
- List of number-one albums of 2017 (Canada)
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments