On the face of it, Lorde’s Melodrama bore all the hallmarks of a disastrous second album waiting to happen. It was the work of an artist whose fame had removed her from the world that inspired her debut, a problem that’s bedevilled everyone from umpteen rappers to the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner. “Pretty soon I’ll be getting on my first plane,” she had sung on Tennis Court, a highlight of 2013’s Pure Heroine, shortly before success catapulted Ella Yelich O’Connor away from suburban New Zealand and into a realm where your choice of boyfriend gets you involved in a Twitter spat with Tyler, the Creator and David Bowie takes your hand at a New York party and proclaims you the future of music. Its making involved the singer jettisoning Joel Little, the Kiwi producer and songwriter who co-authored Pure Heroine – he went on to co-write Khalid’s inescapable, platinum-selling Young Dumb & Broke – in favour of a team of more established mainstream pop figures: among them Taylor Swift and Sia collaborator Jack Antonoff; James Ryan Ho, fresh from working on Zayn Malik’s solo album; Kuk Harrell, of Rihanna, Beyoncé and Katy Perry fame.

But if Melodrama looked on paper like the work of an artist who’d had her head turned by success – or worse, a concerted effort to make Lorde a more straightforward, less idiosyncratic pop star – it turned out to be anything but. Whatever other impact success may have had on her life, it hasn’t blunted O’Connor’s observation. The songs on Melodrama that depict the messy entanglements of early 20s life are as incisive, perceptive and shudder-inducingly familiar as the sketches of teenage suburbia on its predecessor. For all their acute drawing of hollow relationships and the fleeting pleasures of hedonism, they’re far too witty and self-aware to fall into that baffling, post-Drake trap of carrying on as if everyone should feel terribly sorry for you because you’re going to parties, taking drugs and having sex.

The music, meanwhile, demonstrated both O’Connor’s classic melodic facility (the shadow of glam-era Bowie hung over Liability’s beautiful descending chord sequence; Writer in the Dark was that rarest of things, a Kate Bush-influenced song that didn’t make you want to listen to Kate Bush instead) and her ability to twist latter-day pop to her own ends. Supercut, Green Light and Hard Feelings used some of the basic sonic building blocks of mainstream pop – sparse R&B rhythms, house beats and jangling pianos, Giorgio Moroder synths, the pillowy electronic textures of tropical house or Frank Ocean’s emo-soul – but they never sounded quite like anything else in the charts because of the strength of the character at their centre. Melodrama sounded like a uniquely talented artist imposing herself on mainstream pop rather than having mainstream pop imposed on her. It’s worth remembering that the woman who made it is 21 years old. It’s fascinating to think what she might do next.

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