On “Solar Power,” Lorde Loves the Beach

Four years ago, Lorde, the precocious pop star from New Zealand, was discovering the nighttime thrills of young adulthood, and realizing they weren’t quite her cup of tea. On her second album, the critically beloved “Melodrama,” from 2017, the twenty-year-old sang with shades of fury and regret about parties, drunken encounters, and romantic entanglements. “She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a damn liar,” she spat, her voice quiet and vitriolic, on “Green Light,” a pulsating song filled with the coiled energy of someone holding in a dirty secret about the object of her unrequited love. During this era of Lorde’s career, the notion of someone pretending to love the beach represented a double betrayal. There was the raw inauthenticity of the lie, of course. And loving the beach was anathema to the brooding indoor-kid spirit that had become Lorde’s signature—one that helped shape and influence a wave of bruised and understated female pop talent.

Times have changed dramatically, and so has Lorde. Four years later, the singer has returned with a new record about her own metaphysical awakening, one that has entailed a return to the natural world, a fondness for psychedelic drugs, and a newfound sense of personal liberation. On her third album, “Solar Power,” the artist (born Ella Yelich-O’Connor) seems to have shed some of the moodiness and become someone who genuinely does love the beach. “Let’s hope the sun will show us the path,” Lorde sings on the album opener, “The Path,” a song that begins with a spaced-out guitar-and-flute arrangement that would fit nicely on Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

The video for “Solar Power,” the album’s title track and lead single, features Lorde on the beach in a yellow skirt and crop top, flitting around a utopian commune full of happy and healthy-looking young people in flowing, unrestrictive clothing. It’s one of the most playful and upbeat songs Lorde has ever recorded, a peppy sunset-barbecue tune that channels some of the trippy energy of an early-nineties acid act like Primal Scream, but with the pop innocence of Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun” and the ultra-chill acoustic style of the two-thousands beach-bonfire prince Jack Johnson. Lorde is still trying to shed the angsty goth skin of her teen-age years, and sweetness and exultation do not quite come easily to her yet. Transcending the material world and discarding the ego can be an awkward process.

Given the subject matter, it might have been tempting for Lorde to make “Solar Power” a pure concept album, a retro record paying homage to well-trodden waves of peace and love in popular culture, like the Laurel Canyon folk of the late sixties or the PLUR-infused rave styles of the nineties. But Lorde is a generational figurehead who can’t ignore her modern concerns, and her vision—which was refined alongside her go-to producer and co-writer Jack Antonoff—is focussed clearly on the present moment. “Born in the year of OxyContin / Raised in the tall grass / Teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash,” she opens on “The Path,” offering the listeners a stark reminder of 2021. Lorde is also too savvy and cerebral to cede control of her music to pure vibes, and there are layers of self-awareness and winking cultural analysis, which indicate she might be a bit skeptical of herself. On “Mood Ring,” the album’s third single, she sings about the touchstones of the wellness-industrial complex. In a voice so cutesy as to sound mocking, she lists the actions we take to cleanse our minds and bodies: “Ladies, begin your sun salutations / Transcendental in your meditations,” she sings. “I’m trying to get well from the inside / Plants and celebrity news, all the vitamins I consume.”

It doesn’t require a whole lot of mental effort to figure out why Lorde, like so many of us, is questioning her place in the world, discovering a new appreciation for nature, and trying to return to basics. On a personal level, she’s explained that dog ownership helped turn her attention outdoors. A global pandemic and a sickly, smoldering planet has surely prompted her to reëvaluate her priorities. The need to escape the psychic claustrophobia of technology looms large on this record, too. “I throw my cellular device in the water,” she announces on the album’s title track. “Can you reach me? No, you can’t.” (She also says, on “The Path,” that she won’t pick up a call if it’s from “the label or the radio.”) Celebrity has taken its toll on Lorde, who first found the spotlight at the age of sixteen. Throughout the album, she sings of her desire to reject the trappings of wealth and fame—“All the bottles, all the models . . . the kids in the line for the new Supreme,” she sings on “California,” her formal renouncement of Hollywood culture.

If all of this is beginning to sound familiar, that’s because it’s quintessential Lorde. You may recall the defiant, anti-consumerist lyrics and bristling attitude that earned the young singer her first viral hit, back in 2013. On that song, “Royals,” Lorde coolly dismissed an entire generation wrapped up in the power of flashy material acquisitions: alcohol, fancy cars, jewelry, jet-setting. “That kind of luxe just ain’t for us / We crave a different kind of buzz,” she sang, employing the first-person plural in a way that announced her as a new kind of leader. Even as Lorde has morphed from an anguished pop wunderkind into the blissed-out veteran that she plays on “Solar Power,” the themes of excess and alienation weigh heavily on her music. Her new album is a return to form just as much as an evolution. Here she is, under the sun and maybe a little stoned, still questioning the integrity of a former lover: “Now you’re watering all the flowers you planted with your new girlfriend / Outside on the rooftop / Just another phase you’re rushing on through,” she sings on a track called “Dominoes.” “Go all New Age, outrunning your blues.”