Lorde’s Pure Heroine Turns 10: How the Album Elevated Her to Success

Adapted from the original text ‘Realeza por Acaso’, by Rob Tannenbaum for Rolling Stone.

A lamp or a vessel? Ella Yelich-O’Connor – you may know her as Lord – wants to buy a Christmas gift for his manager, so he had a confused look at that chic design store in 2014 in Herne Bay, a neighborhood in Auckland (New Zealand), with the smell of wealth and the sea. Both make great gifts, but Lorde, who is wearing light gray pants and a slightly less gray blouse, is determined to find out which is best. “Taylor is super good at this stuff,” she says. So why not send her a message with photos of the two of you? “Great idea.” Friend Taylor Swift is in London, where it’s almost midnight, and doesn’t respond immediately, so after some more deliberation, Lorde chooses the vessel.

Outside the store, in a cafe on Jervois Road, we are interrupted every six minutes by requests for autographs and photos of polite New Zealanders enjoying the summer heat. A school bus with children in red jackets stops at the traffic lights, and when they notice Lorde there, they wave uniformly delighted.

In “Royals”award-winning song Grammy for Single of the Year in 2014, Lorde mocks the stupidity of pop stars who brag about driving Maybachs and drinking Cristal champagne and also openly offers to replace the idiots dominating the music charts. A very serious conversation for a teenager from nowhere. “I always liked the idea of ​​trust. Like, I called my record Pure Heroine,” she laughs. “Even my stage name is a bit cocky or grandiose.” She mentions a verse from “Dark Fantasy” by Kanye West (“Me found bravery in my bravado” [Encontrei bravura em minhas bravatas]), which gave him the courage to announce his ambition in “Royals.”

“The way I dress and carry myself, a lot of people find it strange or intimidating. I think my entire career can be summed up in one word that I always say in meetings: ‘strength’.”

At 17, Lorde already had two Grammys in her hands (she also received one in the Best Pop Solo Performance category that same 2014) and deserved praise for her smart and quirky album. On the day in October that “Royals” reached number 1 – beating Miley Cyrus –, Lorde posed for a photo shoot in New York. “The photographer kept saying, ‘Wiggle your hips a little. Try to look pretty. A smile now!’ And I thought, ‘I’m number one in this country not because I flirt and wink and all that shit, but because I do exactly what I want to do.’ So no, he didn’t get any smiles.” Then she smiles.

Lorde’s phone rings. It’s a reply message from Taylor Swift. “Oh, shit. She wrote: ‘I loved the lamp.’ Nooooo!”

Eleven different songs reached No. 1 a decade ago in 2013, but none have had as winding a path as “Royals,” which challenged the decades-old, tedious, decadent model for how music is made and marketed. Successes inspire imitations, but Lorde’s combination of chance, accident and latent talent cannot be duplicated.

She recorded Pure Heroine in New Zealand – a country best known for being the setting for the films in the series Lord of the Rings It is The Hobbit –, composing with producer Joel Little, whose minimal fame came from his period as lead singer of Goodnight Nursea local band that sounded like green Day. Lorde and Little – “two random losers”, in her words – worked without interference in his simple studio in Morningside, an industrial estate in Auckland. Every time a truck passed by, they had to stop recording the vocals. Together, they created an album of balanced tracks about teenage life: not just the cliques and boredom, but the emotional patterns specific to Lorde’s generation (“It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care,” she says ).

When her record company in New Zealand heard the tracks, they shrugged. Then, at the end of 2012, Lorde released five songs for free download on SoundCloud, calling the collection The Love Club EP and watched it all happen: downloads, blog comments and endorsements from hit makers (Dr Lukestill at the height of their success at that time), cool girls (Grimes) and cool kids who were successful (Diplo). Russell Crowe It is Karl Lagerfeld – extreme opposites – declared admiration for her music. Just two months after “Royals” debuted on Spotify, it reached the top of the platform’s viral chart. “I thought it would be a cool thing on SoundCloud, but it ended up being a cool thing on iTunes. And on Spotify. And on YouTube. And on the radio”, celebrates the artist.

At that point, Lorde was using Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram to share opinions and fears. He’s written about a popped pimple, fear of homework, about having $26 in the bank (before the Pure Heroine hecatomb, obviously), about his shameless love for Phil Collins. In interviews, she declared herself a feminist, denounced the passive theme of “Come & Get It”, by Selena Gomezas an anti-feminist, and spoke about great writers – Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath – in a way that showed that he had read and understood them. As her music spread, fans learned that Lorde was stubborn, determined and outspoken – a teenager with teeth.

But those who live by the internet also die by the internet. In November 2013, a friend of a friend photographed Lorde on a local beach, in a bikini, hugging her then-boyfriend James Lowewhose family is Chinese, and the photo spread from Facebook and Tumblr to celebrity blogs and websites.

“When I heard about the photos, I thought, ‘Now a bunch of people on the internet are going to be talking about my ass.’” While she knows that commenters are typically “the kind of people who use the word ‘faggot’ as an insult,” she also isn’t “completely immune to the insult. I am a human being.”

The gossip: Lorde’s boyfriend was seven years older. “I didn’t say: ‘Oh, sure, you can go there and date a 24-year-old boy’”, says the singer’s mother, Sonja Yelich. “It’s just that her dad and I know James and we like him. When she was much younger, her first boyfriend was older – four years older or something.” Given Lorde’s maturity, it would be more surprising if she dated someone her own age. And if Justin bieber If I had dated a 24-year-old woman when I was 17, people would have smiled and said “high five”.

When the photo surfaced, bullies and racists on Twitter were delighted. Comments included “Lord’s boyfriend looks like the Chinese exchange student from Hot Girls” and “girl, her boyfriend looks like Mao Zedong.” “Some pretty mean stuff,” Lorde laments. “You almost wonder about human beings.” Walking around Auckland, it is easy to notice that it is a diverse city, with many interracial relationships.

“That’s why the reaction was so surprising to me,” she says. “Nobody I know would think that was a big deal.”

Lorde’s parents couldn’t be less surprised by their daughter’s success. “It’s not the first time people have told us Ella is a genius,” says her mother, after a six-hour drive around Auckland. “Ever since she was 3, teachers have been telling her that.”

Sonja Yelich is a renowned poet who won a national award in New Zealand in the “best first book of poetry” category in 2005. At that point, she frequently accompanied Lorde on tour and, despite knowing her daughter’s maturity, she still worries. “I don’t want her to look like Lindsay Lohan.” Sonja, her husband, Vic O’Connor, and their four children (all born at home) lived in Devonport, a prosperous seaside village with white sandy beaches and a hippie vibe. Although people assume her mother is Lorde’s idol, she is more like her father, a measured and disciplined civil engineer. Family dinners seemed like profane salons, with provocations, shouting and clashes of opinions about art and politics. Sonja says, “We just say it out loud. Very high. Incredibly loud.”

Among her many prizes at school, Lorde won a singing competition with her version of Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue,” accompanied by a classmate, Louis McDonald, whose father began sending the song to local bigwigs, including Scott Maclachlan, from the record company Universal Music in New Zealand. Maclachlan loved Ella’s voice and decided to “extract” her from the duo. When he worked at Jive Records in London, he had been mentored by executive Clive Calderwho plotted the career of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys It is ‘N Sync. A tall, polite pit bull with Morrissey hair and a sharp tongue (when the British pop star Cher Lloyd criticized Lorde, he called her a “talentless little bitch” on Twitter), Maclachlan signed Lorde to a low-cost development deal and dreamed up a typical record company scheme: she would sing some soul classics and he would turn her into a “Joss Stone adolescent”.

But Lorde refused to follow this scheme. The idea of ​​a musical career could have disappeared – which Sonja would not have thought was a bad thing in those days, as she was opposed to her daughter signing a contract, “because she saw great things for her at a university”. If Scott Maclachlan hadn’t married a New Zealander and left London, or if Louis McDonald’s father hadn’t had great ambitions for his son, Lorde’s career wouldn’t exist. However, two other events, even more unforeseen, also happened: the young singer turned out to be a great songwriter and found a collaborator-partner in Joel Little.

Careful about everything that she herself (or her peers) would find tacky or uncool, the then teenager had already turned down many lucrative offers and opportunities, including sums of money “that would make adults cry”, says Maclachlan. Her father worked with an accountant to oversee her finances, which she ignored to the point that she appears to be in a state of denial about her wealth. “It’s a lot of money and I try really hard not to think about it,” she says. “Will I make a good record after thinking about how much money I have? Probably not.” After all, why would Lorde need a lot of money in those distant 2013, 2013? She still lived with her parents.

Lorde walks as if facing a strong wind. Looking with her blue-grey eyes at the heavy black shoes she’s wearing, she leans forward and swings her arms at her sides as she walks quickly through the center of Auckland, heading to a Japanese restaurant where we’re going to dinner. “The way I walk is intimidating, I’ve been told. I walk like a man.” There are some telltale teenage tics about her, including the way she looks away and mumbles when asked a question she doesn’t want to answer.

When I was younger, I stuttered. Psychologists assumed that her mouth couldn’t move as fast as her brain. The stuttering went away, but she frequently faced insomnia. Her mother describes it best: “Ella’s head is always on fire.”

After finishing a bowl of ice cream, we headed to Queen Street, Auckland’s main shopping street. She talked about one of her earliest memories, which reveals a kind of calm confidence. When she was 2 years old, her mother left her in the Children’s area of ​​a shopping center – “It must have been around Christmas” – where children painted cardboard tubes and decorated them with crepe paper. Ella picked up a brush and started using it on a sheet of newspaper, when an adult told her that what she was doing was wrong. “I still remember her voice, and I remember looking up and thinking, ‘I’m in my own world. I know what I’m doing.’” At 2 years old, Ella was already a Lord.