Brendan WalterLorde‘s new album, Melodrama, is out today and is getting rapturous reviews, with many media outlets saying that her sophomore album has cemented her role as the “voice of a generation” or “the voice of today’s youth.” Well, you’d better not call Lorde that to her face: she’s not having it.
Speaking to NME about that description, Lorde rolls her eyes and says, “Oh boy…young people have never needed a specialized spokesperson — one young voice — less than right now.”
She adds, “I’ve always known that it’s bulls**t when people would say ‘voice of a generation.’ I’d be like, ‘I’m gonna nip it in the bud now… This is not what this is, and it will never be that.’”
What Melodrama is, Lorde says, is her personal statement about her life and her experiences.
“The first record was ‘we’ and ‘us’. And this record is ‘I’,” she explains. “The focus does close in. I think that was necessary to get to the level of frankness that’s in there.”
And rather than making comments about the insane state of the world today, Melodrama is more about trying to drown out the horror through sex, booze and partying.
“I was very aware of the fact that we were just holing up in my house, drinking and making a concerted effort to block out the rest of the world,” she says of creating Melodrama. “There was definitely an element of, ‘If we just make our own little universe inside and no one looks at their phones, then none of it’s really happening.’”
Copyright © 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
