Lorde isn’t trying to dance like Beyoncé and failing; she’s dancing like Lorde. From “Rhythm Nation” to “...Baby One More Time,” so much of Western Top 40 pop (and particularly pop made by women) has centred on pristine choreography. What Lorde does with her body is more freeform and spontaneous, and it speaks an entirely different expressive language. As she put it on Facebook, after trolls made fun of her SNL performance online, “One day I will do a normal dance choreographed by a nice person and I will look more like your other favorite performers but we have not yet reached that day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.”

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Sara Houston is a British dance academic at the University of Roehampton and chair of the community dance foundation People Dancing. In an email to The FADER, she explained why she finds Lorde’s stage presence more impactful than the average pop performance. Lorde’s dancing, she wrote, “comes across as uncontrived, unchoreographed, as if she was the girl at a club really into the music. The slightly wild movement, the way she bends her body over so we can't really see her, lends a sense of freedom. She's certainly sexy, but in a way that says, ‘I don't care what you think because you have to take me as I am.’ It's tremendously powerful.”

This uninhibited style perfectly suits the character that Lorde is developing around her new album, Melodrama, due out on June 16. In an April New York Times profile, she explained that album tells the story of a house party. Elaborating on the story of “Green Light” in an interview with Beats 1, she said: “This is that drunk girl at the party dancing around crying about her ex-boyfriend who everyone thinks is a mess. That’s her tonight, and tomorrow she starts to rebuild.” In the free-wheeling “Green Light” video, Lorde wears headphones to signify — like Grimes in the “Oblivion” video — that her dancing is for her pleasure alone. She embodies her loose-limbed character, hunching over as she plays air-piano, crawling on all fours across the roof of a car, and thrashing her hair over her face in almost every other shot.