Music Advisor: Lorde’s Pure Heroine
Lorde
Pure Heroine
Label: Universal
Pure Heroine is (only just) 17-year-old kiwi singer-songwriter Lorde’s debut studio album and was released in September to critical acclaim. Her work has attracted comparisons with artists such as Adele and Lana Del Rey, such is the strength of her vocal range and songwriting. Pure Heroine is influenced by everything from art pop and dark wave, to electronica and synthpop. Some songs will be familiar to fans having been released on The Love Club EP released earlier this year but her raw and brilliant talent means picking up this album will not disappoint. The lead single Royals has become a smash hit topping charts in the USA, Canada, the UK and Ireland.
STACK magazine says: “Pure Heroine – containing the already ubiquitous Tennis Courts and her new single Team – promises more of the formula-breaking sound that charted the success of her Love Club EP; slow and dirty beats, with nothing as gauche as auto-tune or giddily rapturous choruses. “I’ve always had a firm idea of what I liked sonically,” Lorde said in an interview with STACK, ‘and while we were making pop music, we both listen to a lot of electronic, a lot of hip hop. So … more diverse production influences came out on the EP. We didn’t think we were doing anything particularly groundbreaking – just making music we liked’.”
Rolling Stone says: “New artists in 2013 don’t come any “2013”-ier than Lorde. Ella Yelich-O’Connor is 16, but she could be 25. She sings tough and raps soft. She’s from New Zealand, but she could just as easily be from Tampa or Glasgow or Dubrovnik. On her debut, she’s a tiny-life teenager and a throne-watching pop comer with a sound that recalls the Internet hip-hop of Kitty Pryde, the cold-storage torch pop of Lana Del Rey and the primal self-dredging of Florence Welch, while still sounding strangely sui generis. ‘Maybe the Internet raised us/Or maybe people are jerks,’ she muses on ‘A World Alone.’ She’s a child of the cloud.”
Pitchfork says: “In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole. That’s the message you get from the defiantly low-concept video for her single Tennis Court, in which the 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter (real name: Ella Yelich-O’Connor) stares right at you—her taunting, onyx pupils burning a hole through the computer screen. In a moment when too many new artists seem afraid to offend or go off script, Lorde is an exciting contradiction. The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world. Twenty seconds into her debut album, Pure Heroine, she’s already announced that she’s bored. Twice.”
Twitter:
@cher: “@lordemusic SOAR LITTLE WOMAN …….THIS IS YOUR TIME”
@HuffPostCeleb says: “Lorde keeps getting cooler and cooler”
@lenadunham says: “Wait, Lorde is 16!? She MAY still be a royal! IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW AT THAT AGE.”