Our brains adhere an emotional kind of nostalgia to memories attached to the senses. Have you ever felt the sharp pang of cold air as you step into a November morning and are instantly brought back to early shivering hours waiting for a school bus? Have you ever tasted a dessert your mother made each Christmas growing up and found yourself counting the days until Santa Claus slides down your chimney, your heart swelling with an imaginative, child-like sense of joy? Senses have a way of transporting us, sweeping the cobwebs off old memories lodged in the crevices of our minds and making us feel at home.
This is especially the case for me when it comes to music. In middle and high school, I even developed the habit of picking out an album to listen to exclusively on a road trip so I could associate that music with that vacation moving forward. Vivid romanticization is likely a habit I picked up from my Gen Z cohorts.
Being around 12-16 years old during the primetime of fandom culture on Tumblr, I was constantly exposed to fellow teenagers who passionately promoted albums from artists they admired. Mood boards, color palettes, characters, and general “aesthetics,” became attached to these albums. One that ran rampant was the “soft grunge” aesthetic.
Influenced by “grunge” music culture and fashion of the 1990s, the “soft grunge” era of Tumblr featured torn black fishnet tights, denim and leather jackets, black lacey chokers, images of teary eyeliner, burnt cigarettes, oil spills on pavement, and italicized lyrics from songs by artists like The 1975, Arctic Monkeys, and Lana Del Rey. A romanticized blanket of angst and despair fell over chronically online teenagers of the 2010s, the internet inviting young users to express themselves prolifically.
Incidentally, music played a big role in helping teenagers define themselves and their feelings about “coming of age” during this period, as it has during every other period over the last hundred years. Many albums ruled the internet at this time. But when asked what body of work best defines the general tone of this online era of the 2010s - the one that transports me back to my poor winged eyeliner, Doc Marten-, flannel-, and pimple-clad pre-teen self - my answer is simple: Pure Heroine by Lorde.
Lorde, also known as Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, was born in Tapakuna, New Zealand, a suburb of Auckland to a poet and civil engineer. After performing at local talent and radio shows, the young artist got her break before graduating high school. In 2013, at just sixteen years old, she released Pure Heroine, an acclaimed album that features the Grammy Award-winning track “Royals.”
I’ve heard fans say that Lorde has a knack for perfectly encapsulating the essence of her life stage in each of her albums. In Melodrama (2017), the energetic nineteen-year-old reckons with the complexities of her first major heartbreak, exercising her grief and newfound young adulthood by being the life of the party before returning home tear-stained in a cab, feeling like a “Liability.” In Solar Power (2021), a twenty-five-year-old Lorde seeks a life with a slower pace. Still coming to terms with the phoniness of fame and “industry,” she realizes she can escape it all (at least until the world overheats).
On the other hand, Pure Heroine (2013) manages to bottle the frustration, confusion, fear, and anger ridden in a teenage girl coming to terms with a greedy world with just the right balance of coolness and angst in a tight forty minutes. While the album encapsulates the energy of its unique digital age well, it possesses longevity due to its timeless themes of rejecting materiality, status, and the mundanity of suburbia in exchange for authenticity, companionship, and the possibility of a way out.
I have great respect for song production, but I’ve always been drawn to my favorite musical artists because of their lyrics (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, SZA, Frank Ocean, Phoebe Bridgers, etc.). And my pull toward Lorde’s music is no exception. On Pure Heroine, Lorde spins the yarn of a fed-up, black lipstick-clad sixteen-year-old who sees right through the bogus personas her “White Teeth Teen” classmates put up.
She opens the album with the line “don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?” on the first track “Tennis Court,” already introducing her delectably biting, dissatisfied attitude. Lorde’s irritation with inauthenticity is a common thread through her music, and one that listeners hear extensively about on Solar Power (2021) tracks like “California” and “Mood Ring.”
Throughout Pure Heroine, Lorde seems to switch between poking fun at high school hierarchy (“let’s go down to the tennis court and talk it out like ‘yeah’” on “Tennis Court”) and celebrity culture (“we don’t care/we aren’t caught up in your love affair” on “Royals”), making it challenging to deduce whether her allegiance lies with her classmates or fame cohorts. Or, most likely, her switches in perspective offer listeners a look at how the two seemingly opposite worlds of small-town drama and high-scale scandal aren’t so different after all. We’re all merely putting on a show, trying to claw our way up another rung of the popularity ladder by any means necessary.
The two standout tracks for me on this album are the ones that are most sympathetic to the mundanity of suburbia. In “400 Lux,” Lorde is quick to call out the boredom that can fester from being exposed to sameness:
“We’re never done with killing time
Can I kill it with you?
‘Til the veins run red and blue.”
Yet, the “mundanity” is what makes the simple pleasures of suburbia all the sweeter. Lorde paints a picture of a person she has a crush on picking her up in their car, hanging her “head out the window” as they drive around town, through the forested neighborhoods, and to a gas station to pick up orange juice. Even though she alludes to her fame aspirations in lyrics like “dreams of clean teeth,” she praises the often mind-numbing simplicity of her hometown in a tone that’s somehow sarcastic and sincere. She sings:
“I love these roads where the houses don’t change
Where we can talk like there’s something to say
I’m glad that we stopped kissing the tar on the highway
We move to tree streets
I’d like it if you stayed.”
You can sense the privileged nature of her neighborhood and its claustrophobic coziness in lines like:
“Now we’re wearing long sleeves
And the heating comes on”
And
“I can tell that you’re tired
But you keep the car on
While you’re waiting out front.”
The predictability is reliable and comfortable, likely making her aspirations to leave home and make it big as a songwriter all the scarier. A sensation she reflects more on in what’s become the fan-favorite of the album: “Ribs.”
The lyrics and rhythm of “Ribs” are both psychedelic and hypnotic; no matter where I am in space, I zone out when I listen to this song and exist solely in its melody. It sounds almost meditative, to begin with. I’m a teenager at a high school party, standing at the back of the room, staring at my friends. Not wanting this moment to end, but knowing that ultimately it has to. And by the end, the song has me off my feet, jumping, screaming, and raising my hands to the sky (praising Lorde).
What contributes to the spellbinding nature of this song is its repetition of verses at increasing tempos, all while keeping an even, chant-like rhythm. The first verse is:
“The drink you spilled all over me
‘Lover’s Spit left on repeat
My mom and dad let me stay home
It drives you crazy getting old.”
The song’s second chorus adopts the last line in the first verse and tweaks it slightly: “it feels so scary getting old.” Many would argue that Lorde, at just sixteen years old when she wrote this, is not old. Yet, she is so aware of the speed at which her life will change, both because of common developments like graduating high school and also because of her budding fame. The safety of childhood, while pale in comparison to teenage stardom, is easy and comfortable. She wants to savor it when she sings:
“You’re the only friend I need
Sharing beds like little kids
And laughing ‘til our ribs get sore
But that will never be enough.’
I remember listening to this song in middle school and thinking I was old. Reflecting on the magic of Santa Claus, sleepovers, and science fairs in elementary school, I knew that my life was moving at an increasingly rapid pace, just like the song does. Now, as a twenty-two-year-old, freshly graduated from college, I laugh at myself thinking thirteen was old. Just as I know I’ll laugh ten years from now, thinking about how twenty-two felt old. And ten years after that.
The songs on Pure Heroine poke fun at the human-made hierarchies and cliques that persist through high school and Hollywood. And the songs, particularly “Ribs,” encourage us to live in the present, soaking up the seemingly slow-paced mundanity of our hometowns because the only thing that is certain is change.
Having just undergone major life transitions, including graduation and a move, this album feels as relevant to me at twenty-two as it did to me as a thirteen-year-old. I look forward to seeing how this work continues to age with me, teaching me new ways of viewing relationships, authenticity, and home.
Music helps us remember times ! It’s such a gift !