With Ariana Grande’s cathartic (not just for her either), recently released and record-shattering thank u, next, it’s easy to forget that it was just two years ago in 2017 that Lorde brought us her own bleeding heart on a platter in the form of Melodrama (produced by Lana Del Rey’s new golden boy, Jack Antonoff). Waiting four years from the time she put out her debut, Pure Heroine, at the age of fourteen, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor still had much personal growth (a.k.a. the trauma of first love found and lost, something Del Rey knows about even more than both Lorde and Grande, come to think of it) to endure despite releasing arguably the best, most “mature” debut in the history of fourteen-year-olds.
So it was that, at nineteen, after clearly going through her first major heartache and breakup, Lorde bequeathed the world with an unapologetically candid sophomore album, structured in the very same way it tends to go in an actual relationship–minus the part where “Green Light” opens it with an embittered Lorde singing, “Thought you said that you would always be in love/But you’re not in love no more.” And no, it seems that no one stays in love–least of all now, when there’s so much other stimuli to absorb in the alternate universe called “our various screens.” Yet that’s just what Lorde tried to do with her now ex photographer boyfriend James Lowe (yet another man who proves that women’s muses rarely aesthetically match up to the romantic and tortured love/breakup songs written about them). Meeting him at New Zealand’s age of consent–sixteen–when he was twenty-four, their three-year relationship took place during Lorde’s most emotionally vulnerable years, hence the visceral earnestness of Melodrama.
thank u, next, too, possesses an undeniable sincerity of raw emotions as Grande makes such laments as, “We’ll get through this, we’ll get past this/I’m a girl with a whole lot of baggage.” And yet, despite the place of unbridled agony it’s coming from, the purity of Lorde’s lyrical compositions can’t be matched, the injury of first heartbreak at such a young age impossible to replicate (see: Un Amour de Jeunesse).
Capturing that zeitgeist moment in one’s youth when you’re out all the time, “Sober” finds Lorde at a party in the midst of a panic attack while trying her best to adhere to the social decorum by getting increasingly fucked up, leading her to think about that “special someone.” As she explained the backstory of the track, it’s about “being a little bit involved with someone and it’s magic when you are out…you’re maybe committed and you haven’t talked about it…I definitely felt like I had moments where I was like, ‘I need to get drunk to tell this person how I feel.'” So it is that we segue into “Homemade Dynamite,” the tableau of which remains a house party where Lorde meets someone new, experiencing the electric energy of a love at first sight anomaly as she sings, “Don’t know you super well/But I think that you might be the same as me/Behave abnormally.” So it is that the beginnings of a seemingly unbreakable bond are formed.
And because Lorde is what Del Rey would call “young and in love,” in track four, “The Louvre,” she is still experiencing all the giddy sensations of premier amour while, conversely, Grande has quickly realized on “bloodline,” “No, we won’t be talking the next day/I ain’t got nothin’ to say/I ain’t lookin’ for my one true love/Yeah, that ship sailed away.” For as James Lowe is to Lorde, Mac Miller is to Ariana Grande. At the same time, Lorde is aware in the back of her mind that it’s all “a rush at the beginning/I get caught up for just a minute,” knowing somewhere deep down that she’s overblowing what amounts to a summer fling–a blip–into a lifelong romance.
So it is that by track five, Lorde is at last aligning her motif with Grande’s “Fake Smile,” offering the “it’s a bitch being in the spotlight while trying to do romance or mourn a breakup” anthem, “Liability.” Self-pityingly (but not inaccurately) rueing, “They say, ‘You’re a little much for me, you’re a liability’/So they pull back, make other plans/I understand, I’m a liability,” Lorde mirrors Ariana’s later notion, “I can’t fake another smile/I can’t fake like I’m alright/And I won’t say I’m feeling fine/After what I been through, I can’t lie.”
Just as Ari had to discover self-love in “thank u, next” with the lyric, “Plus I met someone else, and we havin’ better discussions/ I know they say I move on too fast/But this one gon’ last/’Cause her name is Ari And I’m so good with that,” so, too, did Lorde. Coming to the conclusion that even if she ends up driving men away with her spotlight on a regular basis, she at least has “the only love I haven’t screwed up/She’s so hard to please but she’s a forest fire/I do my best to meet her demands, play at romance/We slow dance in the living room, but all that a stranger would see is one girl swaying alone, stroking her cheek.” So yes, a resigned self-love anthem in a way, not quite as secure in its sologamy as “thank u, next.”
With “Hard Feelings/Loveless,” the rage phase of the breakup is palpable as Lorde, in the style of Amy Winehouse’s “Wake Up Alone,” somewhat bitterly insists she’s keeping busy and engaging in the proper distractions of self-care with the lines, “I light all the candles/Cut flowers for all my rooms/I care for myself the way I used to care about you.” At the same time, “bad idea” on thank u, next wields the presence of a new body (Davidson) in Grande’s bed as a means for mitigation of pain. The pain that Lorde instead masks with her constant mention of various drugs and alcohol at parties and bars.
“Sober II,” reflective of the aftermath of a relationship’s good times in that moment when the lights come on post-party to reveal the grotesque debris, paints the picture of how “there’s such a sadness to the lights being on after a party, you know, this whole room has sort of been washed in this dark, and to see the corners of the room again can always be a little bit heartbreaking.” Almost as heartbreaking as the loss of giddiness from those first highs that come with the outset of falling in love. Grande, too, seems determined to recreate them (most specifically in terms of all the good sex that comes with) by constantly creating the (melo)drama of a fight so that she and her lover can make up again on, well, “make up.”
Similar to the motif of “Liability,” “Writer in the Dark” also offers a sonic tone in the vein of Grande’s “ghostin.” Again lamenting the fact that every man seems to feel stifled by the blindingness of her spotlight, Lorde taunts, “Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark/Now she’s gonna play and sing and lock you in her heart.” Grande surely knows the exact feeling these days (unlike Taylor Swift, who keeps luring men into her lair to break up with and write songs about)–with no one strong enough to withstand allusions to his penis in song if it doesn’t measure up to Pete Davidson’s.
Speaking to her time with both Miller and Davidson, Grande’s “in my head” is a testament to what we all fall prey to when something has ended: over idealizing what really happened via the dangerous drug of nostalgia. Lorde is the willing victim of it as well on “Supercut,” in which she replays all the best moments between her and her now ex-lover, admitting, “And in my head the visions never stop/These ribbons wrap me up/But when I reach for you/There’s just a supercut.” Using that phrase, “in my head,” several times, Lorde seems just as well-aware as Grande of perhaps hyper-romanticizing something that was, in the end, fated to fail (like most attempts at monogamy). At best (or maybe at worst), we can still hold onto what we loved about a person with our proverbial supercut.
While Lorde might not take her feelings of woe to quite the empowered level of Grande taunting, “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored” (going even one step further in the video itself), her coda to Melodrama, “Perfect Places,” comes to the conclusion that living and dying through a cocktail of drugs every night isn’t necessarily the way to find that “perfect place” in another realm that doesn’t really exist–is ultimately just a lot of tail-chasing (not in the way an 80s douchebag means “tail”). Nor does Lorde seem as content or “live and let live” enough to learn from the failure of a relationship to embody the message thank u, next‘s eponymous lead single.
So maybe Lorde offers the kind of breakup album to listen to when you really do want to “fuck a fake smile,” and simply crawl into the moody blues of your forever unfolding melodrama, ergo Melodrama.
