PicoBlog

A year ago today, Lorde released her third studio album, “Solar Power,” and for one day on the internet, everybody who listened to the album seemingly had an opinion on it. The words “flop,” “drab,” and “music for a pharmaceutical commercial” were tossed around by listeners and Great Value brand critics (tweeters) alike.

When it arrived, I listened to the album a few times (it came out right before my 22nd birthday, so the line “I thought I was a genius, but now I’m 22” was a lyrical treat for me in September) before eventually discarding it, as if the album was a crossed-off list of to-do’s on a piece of paper I kept on my desk for a few weeks too long.

I didn’t think it was fabulous, groundbreaking, or life-changing like I did about “Pure Heroine” when I was 13 and “Melodrama” when I was 17. Those aforementioned albums brimmed with a certain angst and criticism and fluorescent energy that is strongest when sourced from a suburban bedroom when you’re 18 or from a party’s bathroom at 3 a.m. “Solar Power” was about… the sun. And touching grass. And the ocean. And Lorde’s sun-soaked life in New Zealand, away from screens (she threw her phone in the water… did you hear?), away from nearly two years of Covid surges, and away from a government that continually proves to its citizens how little it cares about their existence. Life was different for Lorde; the music reflected this.

For listeners, this was a tough and salty cup of ocean water to gulp down. Where is the angst?!?! We want to be on fire again! We want the earthy synths of “Supercut” to beat into our heart on a crowded dance floor and the tender vulnerability of the lyrics “you’re a little much for me” to echo in the bathroom as we cry in the shower, because YES!! we are a little much for our loved ones from time to time and GOD did we want someone to tell us that.

Instead, we got a Gillette commercial’s background music, “it’s time to cool it down, whatever that means,” and bleach blond Lorde.

I didn’t expect “Solar Power” to be fluorescent or fabulous. Being “19 and on fire” is a lot different from thinking you were a genius until you turned 22. Despite the album’s beachy forgetability, it received an unwarranted amount of criticism, much of it for the wrong reasons. Rather than a general lack of quality or substance, the album faced listeners with an unrelenting sense of nostalgia and an inability to meet the artist where she was at.

Pitchfork writer Anna Gaca called “Solar Power” an album about “climate grief and puppy grief and social grief.” That’s the first issue. Lorde has continually made albums that are less about one idea or one feeling and more like a diary entry encompassing a chunk of her life, in a sense. I have always considered a Lorde album like a musical timestamp of sorts. Claiming fame at only 16, she grew with her fans and made music to reflect the feelings of young adulthood as they grew into those stages of life with her. So the album isn’t solely about her dog dying, or the rising ocean levels just because “Big Star” and “Fallen Fruit” mention both, in the same way that Lana Del Rey’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell” isn’t about Kanye West or forest fires, just because she mentions both in “The greatest.” Lorde, to both reviewers and casual listeners, became this authority figure on phones and climate change simply by having a few public thoughts on each.

In the first song on the album, Lorde tells us “If you’re looking for a savior, it’s not me.” She’s laid her claim, both for this album and for the treatment of celebrities as reverential life coaches or authorities. Whatever you’re expecting from me, I can’t give that to you, she basically tells us on the first track. She isn’t the CDC, she isn’t some depressed teen’s psychiatrist, she isn’t a climate scientist. She’s a pop star that spends her time offstage with family and friends, getting high at the beach, reading magazines.

And then there’s the whole “pharmaceutical commercial” argument. Yes, the titular song does sound like something Activia would eat up in one of their yogurt ads. But you know what recently released album also sounds like fodder for JC Penney or Glade? Harry Styles’ third studio album, “Harry’s House.” When Lorde’s single, “Solar Power,” was released last summer, Twitter went hysterical for a few days with the “music for a commercial” bit. Meanwhile, when Styles’ department store bop “Music For a Sushi Restaurant” came out, I got one algorithmically targeted TikTok on my For You Page about its Target playlist-ification, and heard little to nothing else. “Harry’s House” has little substance, “cocaine, sideboob” empty lyrics, and zero musical experimentation, but the album escaped the “bad art” title that Lorde’s third album failed to do. Maybe it was because of the playability of a Styles’ song, manufactured for radio and Spotify hits despite any true message—unless you count a true message as “be happy” and “treat people with kindness.” Or maybe it’s because musicians who identify as men fall under less scrutiny with their art than their women counterparts. Who knows.

What I do know is that, although “Solar Power” will never be my favorite Lorde album, it will always be Lorde’s most misunderstood piece of work, a happy, lush, lyrically strong album that got the internet meme treatment.

On July 4th weekend, my roommates and I made an hour-long trek to Rockaway Beach in Queens. Sequestered from any accessible form of natural beauty in New York City, laying my pale body on a sheet of sand and reconnecting with the whooshes of calm ocean water felt like I was an astronaut coming back from space and eating a home-cooked meal.

“Shouldn’t an album about climate grief and puppy grief and social grief by one of the best pop songwriters of her generation make you feel something?” Gaca writes in her review. Maybe, what Lorde failed to consider when making and releasing a happy beach album was the fact that many of her listeners weren’t happy or near the beach. That’s not entirely her fault, and it isn’t entirely the fault of the listeners.

As the waves crashed to the shore, as the beach bums around me kicked a soccerball from one person to another, as I sipped on my Trader Joe’s hard kombucha and listened to “Solar Power” for the first time since last September, I thought to myself, “This is where I should’ve been listening to this album all along.” On the beach I felt happy. The album sounded good.

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Thank you for reading! I am in Canada, enjoying plenty of poutine and the thought of universal healthcare—only the thought, though.

Things I’m Loving:

• After watching “Strange Loop” in New York with my family, I loved this feature by one of my favorite culture writers, Wesley Morris, about Tyler Perry’s influence on modern theater.

• I just finished Kiley Reid’s “Such a Fun Age,” which was a fast-paced satire that got a lot of hype post-George Floyd. Was it perfect? Nah. But if the book happens to fall in your lap, take a read.

• Canadian goat cheese! It’s so fresh tasting.

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