Pure Heroine

On her debut album, 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter Ella Yelich-O'Connor, aka Lorde, has fashioned herself as a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Pure Heroine is a collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop. More fully realized than her debut EP The Love Club, Pure Heroine is a fluid collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop that sometimes sounds like St. Vincent’s "Champagne Year" mixed into whatever’s in the punch at Abel Tesfaye’s house. Still, a lot of its best production ideas and lyrical motifs repeat in such a way that it sometimes feels like you’re listening to 10 versions of the same song. Current single "Team" has a memorable chorus, but most of its lyrics ("I'm kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air"; "We live in cities you never see on screen/ Not very pretty but we sure know how to run things") feel like scrapped lines from the "Royals" session. "Glory and Gore", too, rehashes the same bloody/regal/teen imagery, but its greater crime is the way Lorde overstuffs the verses with so many words that it weighs down the melody. And yet, there’s something endearing about Pure Heroine’s more unfiltered impulses—though she’s had a  record contract nearly a quarter of her life, you get the sense Lorde is still being given a lot of room to breathe and hone her own particular songwriting voice. These tracks all feel like they were written by a very precocious teenager, and that’s a big part of their charm. — Pitchfork