Green Light, Lorde’s first single since her 2014 Hunger Games tie-in Yellow Flicker Beat, starts off in familiar territory for the 20-year-old New Zealand-born pop prodigy. Over a sparse piano beat, she sings of car-applied makeup and being together yet separate from someone who is “a damn liar” at a bar; spectral backing vocals that recall the choirs accompanying her on earlier singles such as Team spit out lyrics about a great white’s teeth, continuing another poetic motif from her earlier work.

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But then, the song shifts, turning Technicolor and dragging Lorde on to the dance floor. Urgent house pianos rise in the mix as she sings of hearing “sounds in my mind / brand new sounds in my mind”; the backing vocals turn boisterous, sounding like a clutch of dancehall divas who are serving as Lorde’s guardian angels, pulling her toward post-heartbreak redemption. The push-pull continues until the ebullience wins out, in a joyous outro that recalls the processed-guitar glee exhibited by Madonna’s Ray Of Light, Swirl 360’s Hey Now Now, and other sunshine-bright alt-pop hits of the late 90s.

While Lorde’s low purr might make her an unexpected candidate for up-and-coming dance diva, Green Light works well, its witchy verses playing off the chorus’s dancefloor-born catharsis and the outro recalling the best parts of those late-90s attempts to combine the aesthetics of alt-rock – crushing synths, pealing guitars, a general feeling of suspicion – with the big-tent appeal of pop. Given Lorde’s status as a festival headliner, the move toward grandiosity makes sense; what’s surprising is how well it works with her fluttering contralto, which gains strength as the song strides to its triumphant conclusion.

Produced by Jack Antonoff of the jitter-synth act Bleachers and the pomp-rock band fun., and accompanied by a video where Lorde dances on her own in a club bathroom and atop an SUV, Green Light is the first taste of Lorde’s forthcoming album Melodrama, which, Lorde tweeted on Wednesday, will tell “the story of the last 2 wild, fluorescent years of [her] life”. That story, Lorde told Beats 1’s Zane Lowe after the premiere of Green Light on Thursday, begins with heartbreak.

“It’s not something that I really am used to writing about,” she said. “It took me a while to be able to figure out how to write about that – it was my first major heartbreak. The song is about those moments immediately after your life changes, and the silly little things your mind gravitates towards. I say, ‘She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a liar.’ What the fuck, she thinks you like the beach? You don’t like the beach! It’s these little stupid things.”

Lorde’s schedule over the coming months includes festivals such as Coachella and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fest. Melodrama is scheduled to come out in June.