When fans don’t want change: Should we give Lorde a break and respect her need for growth?

After a four-year wait, many of us are disappointed. Last week, pop princess Lorde, who first rose to prominence aged 16 with her debut album Pure Heroine, finally released her much-anticipated third record, Solar Power, and it’s a stark tonal departure from her earlier work.

Lorde’s masterwork second album, 2017’s Melodrama, went gold in the UK and double platinum in her native New Zealand, as well as placing in numerous end-of-year lists. Taking its source material from the breakdown of her three-year relationship with photographer James Lowe, the album oscillated between melancholy self-deprecating piano ballads such as “Liability” and equally bittersweet beats like “Supercut”. Pockets of the internet instantly identified the album as a collection of “depression jams” – the perfect soundtrack to our own potential sadness, heartbreak and hurt. Solar Power, however, is something entirely different.

The signs of carefree abandon were there from the pre-release teasers. In June, the star revealed the album cover: a happy-go-lucky picture of her scantily clad butt-cheeks, eclipsing the sun during a frolic on the beach. This was a far cry from the deep-blue, starlit boudoir painting the singer had commissioned for the cover of Melodrama. It also felt slightly out of step with the harrowing context of a pandemic, particularly for those who have spent the last year and a half stuck indoors on Britain’s rainy shores. Later that month, Lorde announced to fans in her newsletter: “There’s someone I want you to meet. Her feet are bare at all times. She’s sexy, playful, feral, and free. She’s a modern girl in a deadstock bikini, in touch with her past and her future, vibrating at the highest level when summer comes around.” It seemed that Lorde was revealing a new persona; that the teen angst that threaded through her previous work had, to our dismay, been displaced by an aura of saccharine, almost privileged tranquillity. In a jokey indictment of the star’s transformation, one viral tweet read: “I feel like 2014 Lorde would have hated 2021 Lorde.”

The album itself did not subvert any of these expectations (despite some critics suggesting that the whole thing might be some kind of elaborate performance art). The acoustic strum on its title track gives it the atmosphere of a late-2000s feel-good Jason Mraz song. The music video’s visuals – which are supposed to exude beach chill, but come off as stiff and orchestrated – are much the same. Sonically, the rest of the album is equally pared back and lacklustre, with The Independent describing the overall work as “more miss than bliss”.

At first glance, it might seem as though Lorde fans resent the star’s happiness. That is not the case. Rather, we are struggling to reconcile Lorde’s meme-ified, purple-lipstick sad-girl image with a new reality. In the four years that she was gone (and considering the singer has virtually abandoned her social media, she really was gone), she became solidified in fans’ minds as an ambassador for angst. If we solely viewed our music consumption through the lens of Spotify mood playlists, then Lorde sat firmly in “sad vibes”, and she had not released anything new to challenge that idea. Although a lot of time has passed, the legacy of Melodrama has been kept very much alive online (I personally still listen to it regularly), and so the sand, sea and sundresses feel like a sudden U-turn. And as her previous mood has vanished, it seems that some of Lorde’s lyrical nuance and poetry have gone with it. Wonderful lines like “Because ours are the moments I play in the dark/ We were wild and fluorescent, come home to my heart” have been supplanted by cringe-inducing throwaways such as “Can you reach me?/ No, you can’t”.

Lorde is far from the first artist to reinvent herself to the disappointment of fans. A perfect historical example is Bob Dylan’s infamous Blonde on Blonde performance in Manchester in 1966, which saw a fan shout “Judas!” after the previously acoustic folk singer plugged in an electric guitar. Of course, the “wild metallic” sound Dylan achieved on Blonde on Blonde is now widely understood to be the peak of his career (although plenty of reinvention would come for the singer later down the line). A more contemporary comparison is Kanye West’s strange and experimental album Yeezus, which was panned by critics after its release in 2013, but is now considered a genre-defining work that was way ahead of its time. The problem with Solar Power, however, is that it simply doesn’t feel like a revolutionary new sound or image for Lorde – on the contrary, it feels pretty empty, derivative and dated.

Although we may feel abandoned and let down, maybe we should accept that artists are always going to progress, experiment and repeatedly reinvent themselves. It’s a fundamental part of crafting out a career, remaining relevant to ensure that you become more than a one-hit wonder. Over four decades, Madonna has been iconised as a trailblazer for reinvention – resurrecting herself as a punky pop princess, an innocent churchgoer, an Eighties disco diva, a leather-clad dominatrix, and the shape-shifting Madame X. Britney, meanwhile, swapped school uniforms for snakes and megastars like Beyoncé have toyed with numerous personas, sounds and themes.

At this point, Taylor Swift pretty much rebrands herself on a two-year cycle. Discussing the pressures of this process in last year’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana, she said: “Everyone is a shiny new toy for like two years. The female artists have reinvented themselves 20 times more than the male artists. They have to or else you’re out of a job. Constantly having to reinvent, constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny.” I also can’t help but think of a line in Melodrama’s “Liability”, in which Lorde laments people’s need for novelty (in romantic relationships, but also, perhaps, in fandom): “The truth is I am a toy that people enjoy/ ’Til all of the tricks don’t work anymore/ And then they are bored of me.”

They have a point. Music shouldn’t be a cookie-cutter production line that only works to meet specific consumer desires, and the temptation to view things this way is one of the uglier sides of fandom. Artists are people, and their music comes with the context of life experience – in this case, Lorde’s heart-wrenching 2017 break-up. Lorde is no longer sad, and has actually talked at length about her healing journey towards better mental health, which involved going offline and taking a lot of psychedelics. It may not be relatable to all of us, but equally, it would be absurd to demand that she return to the person she was at 20. Lorde even nods to this idea in Solar Power’s “Stoned At the Nail Salon”, singing: “All the music you loved at 16, you’ll grow out of/ And all the times, they will change.” Change is a part of music and life – and as Lorde notes, the two are intertwined.

Artist “rebrands” are not always received with open arms, but at their best, they push the bounds of genre, and push their listeners, too. Even at their worst, they still represent an experiment for the artist, and a stepping stone to the next stage in their evolution. While Solar Power might fall into the latter camp, the silver lining is, of course, that Lorde is happy, and you can’t fault her for that.