Lorde - No Better

We roll in every summer and there’s strength in our numbers.

“No Better” was a single in the anticipation of Pure Heroine’s release. It came out last December, quietly flitted to #19 on the New Zealand charts, and then disappeared again, not a ripple left on the surface. It’s on the iTunes extended version of Pure Heroine, but has been almost entirely forgotten. It’s been lost, in popular consciousness of Lorde’s discography. Despite that, I think it’s beautifully demonstrative of the softer side of Pure Heroine - it is, in many ways, the polar opposite of “Tennis Court”, of the many things that make “Tennis Court” so compelling. It’s not a song about certainty. “No Better” is a song about summer and the way that summer heat makes you slow and languid but also achingly, painfully aware of the people you’re with. Something about sweetness that shatters your bones, something about sweat that sticks your hair damp to the back of your neck and makes you want to cry. It’s a song about summer, and then it’s a song about the winter that comes and how you yearn for sunshine and the way that everything was hot and disgusting and so, so easy.

It opens we roll in every summer when there’s strength in our numbers / and your breath’s hot and gross and I kiss you like a lover.

Her voice during the verse lies in a near-falsetto that’s not uncomfortable for her, exactly, but a bit wobbly – it’s reaching, grasping, artless in a way she rarely is. She’s got a memory caught and tangled in the strands of her voice and she’s not letting it go, uncertain and childish but wanting. That’s the thing about summer, isn’t it? You never want it to end and it always does. You probably would like it less if it really went on forever, and she knows that: we roll in every summer, over and over again, you and your friends and the strength and your numbers and the person you love, sweat on their face like a salt-lick.

Legs stick to the seats of the car someone grew into

I forget the knowledge from the lessons that I went to.



And Jamie picks fights but they’re weak and short-lived

Because no one can be bothered when it’s humid like this

“No Better” is, like much of Pure Heroine, about the gap between the passage of time and the immediacy of emotion: the car that someone grew into, of past summers and the knowledge that winters also came after them, but also legs sticking to the seats, the weak and short-lived fights because no one can be bothered to really pick at each other when it’s humid - the immediacy of summer, the way that heat plays off your skin and makes your cells burn and light up, the one-two punch of languid easiness brought on by humidity slicking along your tongue and the summer breeze darting along your skin daring you to touch someone. I forget the knowledge from the lessons that I went to, she sings, and those aren’t just school-lessons; they’re pointedly ignored past summers, when no one drove that car and things were almost the same but not quite. Her voice alternately swoops up in uneven little twists and curls under itself in throaty swallows. I kiss you like a lover ends with the last syllable of lover stuck in her throat, like the casual immensity of it is too much. Try come out and steal our thunder darts upward on the last word, hovers at the end of thunder for just a moment until it tilts back down into the beat.

Time passes, in this song. It’s barely three minutes long and it contains months, multitudes. Now the days are getting colder. It’s fall now, even winter, and the framework of your desire is fundamentally different, has shifted with the shifting seasons.

Now the days are getting cooler

and the burning of our limbs doesn’t happen quite as bad and the burn is just

skin-deep in the fantasies and dreams of the winter like the movies

that we watched to pretend it wasn’t winter.

It’s cool out and school has started back up again and every sensation that you felt is a little bit less, except for maybe the ugly dull fighting that happens when you don’t have sunshine and humidity to keep everyone together. But your limbs still burn and you still want the people you’re with – winter is a time for dreaming, for hazy hibernation of desire until something draws it back to the surface like pricking a vein and drawing blood. You watch movies to pretend it isn’t winter. You sit with your friends curled up on a tiny couch and the burn is just skin-deep. Every physical sensation counted up in simple terms: this is how you feel, this is what you do, this is what you want (you want, and you want, and you want.)

Time passes in “No Better” and it’s clear that time has always passed but the world is teetering on the edge of a change. Everywhere we go I can feel the subtle taste / of the deeds outgrown and the welcome overstayed. Before I left for college I walked around in a kind of daze for months, trying desperately to appreciate everything around me but with the knowledge that I was about to be realigned down to my bones. The deeds outgrown and the welcome overstayed, all my uncertainty wrapped in a phrase. The dichotomy that makes up Pure Heroine exists in this song, bright and clear and less jaded than the album itself, but inescapably present. The certainty that time will pass is layered over with the sheer joy that things are happening now; the knowledge that eventually all the emotions you feel will get filed away coexists with the way they make you feel now. Listen to the chorus really carefully: the low throaty alto of Lorde’s matter-of-fact voice drawn over with a layer of falsetto, no sugar in it but a sweetness nonetheless. Go all the way, have your fun, have it all. This will take you down / Get through the days, do your thing, do it will. This will take you down. Keep going, doing your thing, it’ll take you down - but have your fun anyway.

And look, look: the charm of this song, for me, hinges on the side-ways sensual little lines that propel the half-verse right before the steady chant of the chorus.

And you’re no better at swimming than you were in the beginning but you come over at night and we practice all the breathing.

Kids taking swimming lessons in the summer, laughing and unserious, breathing into each others mouths at night. It’s such an unsexy way to talk about sex, really, or even to talk about kissing – hey, c’mon, breathe into my mouth. But something about that discomfort is the same as the thrill of summer mingling with the way your legs stick to a seat with sweat. Visceral emotion overlayed with awkward specificity, in a way that worms its way into your skull as truth. I’m chewing gum and it’s killing you, she says, you come over at night and we practice all the breathing and I’m chewing gum and it’s killing you, lines that roll around my head over and over. Weird, right? So weird. Such a strangely specific image, pink bubblegum chewed and popped and a girl whose mouth tastes like it when someone breathes into it. Summer – what Summer Feels Like (dizzy, rushing, giddy) and also just what summer feels like, your legs sticking to the seat with sweat in a car that someone is finally allowed to drive. We’re getting dead and it’s the right way to do it.