The Daily Spin, December 15
Lorde | Pure Heroine
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Pure Heroine (2013)
Artist: Lorde
Link:
For a long time, I wasn’t really sure how to feel about Lorde - undeniably talented, yes, but a lot of her music that landed a ton of radio play wasn’t really to my liking. The best thing I thought she had put out was actually a remix, a long-hidden Flume rework that only made it to streaming services earlier this year.
It wasn’t that her debut wasn’t impressive - quite the contrary - but it just wasn’t really my style at the time. It took her second album, 2017’s Melodrama, for me to really hop onto the Lorde train, and boy oh boy did that one take off.
I can feel the building blocks there to push her towards pop superstardom, but it’s also clear that these are the unsteady steps of a young artist - and I’m simultaneously tempted to praise her for the vision and the talent at such a young age and hold her honest, because I haven’t made allowances for anyone else, really.
At the end of the day, this is a very enjoyable little alt-pop album, and when it’s good, it becomes immediately and frantically clear why Lorde has ascended so, and that’s enough for me.
Rating: 8.2/10
Best Tracks: White Teeth Teens; A World Alone; Team
Worst Tracks: Royals; Still Sane