In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole. That's the message you get from the defiantly low-concept video for her single "Tennis Court", in which the 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter (real name: Ella Yelich-O'Connor) stares right at you—her taunting, onyx pupils burning a hole through the computer screen—for a hypnotic and somewhat uncomfortable three and a half minutes. (It's an anti-video in the tradition of the Replacements' "Bastards of Young", and, fittingly, her moody cover of "Swingin Party" has been making the rounds.) In a moment when too many new artists seem afraid to offend or go off script, Lorde is an exciting contradiction: an aspiring pop star who's had a major-label development deal since age 12 (she was discovered at a local talent show) but has retained a seemingly genuine iconoclastic streak. The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift; Katy Perry asked her to tour with her and—politely but firmly—she said no. With the global smash "Royals" (the first song in 17 years by a female solo artist to top Billboard’s alternative chart) she made her name by sneering at everything else on the radio ("We don't care/ We aren't caught up in your love affair"). The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks. Twenty seconds into her debut album, Pure Heroine, she's already announced that she's bored. Twice.

在當今的流行音樂世界里，Lorde是一個黑洞般的存在。這在輕蔑性的《Tennis Court》淺概念音樂視頻得以體現(xiàn)，視頻里16歲的新西蘭創(chuàng)作歌手（原名：Ella Yelich-O'Connor）直視盯著你——她的嘲諷，黑瑪瑙的瞳孔把你電腦屏幕燒出洞似的——帶來的催眠感和不適感長達3分半鐘（一支沿襲換牌樂隊（The Replacements）?"Bastards of Young"傳統(tǒng)的破舊立新的音樂視頻，她也繼續(xù)情緒化地翻唱了該樂隊的《Swingin Party》）。當今太多的年輕藝術(shù)家畏懼得罪他人或打破傳統(tǒng)，Lorde則是一個令人興奮的矛盾體：一名有抱負的流行歌手，自12歲起就與大唱片公司簽約(她是在本地的一場才藝表演中被發(fā)掘的)，但打破傳統(tǒng)似乎是流淌在她血液里的天性。不久前，她在一次采訪說話過于露骨，無意間辱罵了Taylor Swift；Katy Perry邀請她共同巡演，她禮貌但堅定地拒絕了。隨著全球大熱單曲《Royals》的發(fā)行（這是17年來首位登頂公告牌另類排行榜的solo女歌手單曲），她因嘲諷電臺上所有其他單曲而一舉成名("We don't care/ We aren't caught up in your love affair")。Lorde將她在世界舞臺上塑造為一個一切事物都不在乎的人。專輯《Pure Heroine》拉開序幕的前20秒中，她已兩次表示自己厭倦至極。

Lorde's voice occasionally takes the form of a wide-eyed, Feist-y coo, but much more often it's a low, clenched growl; like everything else about her, it has an air of "wise beyond her years." "I didn't start writing songs until I was 13," she said in a recent interview, almost apologetically, but then quickly accounted for the lost time, "Before that, I wrote short fiction." Now that she's a wizened 16, Lorde, who wrote all the lyrics on Pure Heroine and co-wrote the music, has fashioned herself a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Her songs capture the drama and debauched regality of being a teenager: their subjects include online gossip, empty bottles, queen bees, and young people who already feel old. "I'm kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care," she sings with a languid sigh on the bleacher-stomping single "Team". Or is she saying "revelled"? It's hard to tell the two words apart, and maybe that's the point.

盡管Lorde的聲音偶爾會呈現(xiàn)出瞪大眼睛，F(xiàn)eist式的呢喃效果，但更多時候是低沉的、握緊拳頭的咆哮；就像她的其他方面一樣，蘊含著一種“超越年齡的智慧”?！拔覐?3歲開始寫歌，”她在最近的一段采訪中幾乎帶著歉意地說道，但她很快解釋了失去的時間，“在那之前，我寫短篇小說。”如今，她是名滿臉皺紋的16歲少女，為《Pure Heroine》寫完所有的歌詞，也參與音樂的創(chuàng)作過程，把自己塑造成一個記者，代表小資揮霍無度的后數(shù)字時代青年文化和工薪階層郊區(qū)無聊生活。她的歌曲捕捉到了戲劇性和青春期沉迷酒色的特權(quán)：它們的主題包括網(wǎng)上八卦、空瓶子、社交女王和已經(jīng)覺得自己年老力衰的年輕人。"I'm kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care," 她在體育館露天看臺沉重地邊走邊疲憊呆滯地在《Team》中唱道。等等，她說的是“狂歡作樂（revel）”嗎？很難分清兩者的區(qū)別，也許這就是妙處所在。

That carefully cultivated ambiguity is precisely what makes Pure Heroine work. "Royals" walks the line between rebelling against and reveling in the trappings of power, luxury, and excess of contemporary pop. The arrangement is economical—just a few finger snaps and a barely-there beat caught in the gravitational pull of Lorde's charisma—but overall, "Royals" gets to have it both ways. Lorde says she wrote it thinking of how she and her friends would listen to A$AP Rocky rapping about couture while they rummaged through a particular friends' well-stocked kitchen, too broke (or too lazy) to spend money on dinner. And that’s a crucial subtlety: "Royals" doesn't critique hip-hop culture so much as express a disconnect that many of the people who love it (Lorde included: "I've always listened to a lot of rap") feel when listening to songs about luxury culture. Whether she's singing about her schoolyard peers or the world's most famous pop stars (who, as she admits on "Tennis Court", have just become her new peers) Lorde achieves a tricky balancing act of exposing irony and even hypocrisy without coming off as preachy or moralistic, simply because—thanks to Pure Heroine's constant use of the royal "we"—she's usually implicating herself in the very contradictions she's exposing.

正是這種精心培養(yǎng)的模糊性使得《Pure Heroine》大獲成功?！禦oyals》游走于對權(quán)力、奢華的反叛和陶醉和無節(jié)制的當代流行樂之間。整首歌的編曲非常精煉——只是簡單的響指聲和幾乎不存在的節(jié)奏便讓你陷入Lorde散發(fā)的魅力中?！偟恼f，《Royals》是兩全其美的。Lorde提到寫這首歌時，她腦海中映入眼簾的是自己和朋友們一邊聽著A$AP Rocky說唱著高級定制時裝的話題，一邊在一個特殊朋友庫存充足的廚房里翻找東西，因為太窮(或太懶)而沒錢吃晚飯。這是一個至關(guān)重要的微妙之處:《Royals》并沒有批評嘻哈文化，而是表達了許多熱愛嘻哈文化的人(包括Lorde在內(nèi)：“我總是聽很多說唱音樂”)聽關(guān)于奢侈品文化的歌曲時會感到明顯脫節(jié)。無論是唱校園里的同齡人，還是世界上最名聲大噪的流行巨星(正如她在《Tennis Court》中承認的那樣，這些明星剛成為她的新朋友)。Lorde巧妙地平衡了諷刺和偽善，而又不顯得啰嗦或說教?！嗵潯禤ure Heroine》不斷使用高貴的“我們”這一詞——她經(jīng)常使自己卷入她所發(fā)現(xiàn)的矛盾中。

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.

《Pure Heroine》比她的首張EP《The Love Club》更能充分地體現(xiàn)此概念?！禤ure Heroine》是一部流動的專輯，記錄悸動、喜怒無常、恐懼、麻木的情緒。有時候聽起來像?St. Vincent的"Champagne Year"與Abel Tesfaye（The Weeknd本名）的混音。盡管如此，專輯的許多最好的制作理念和抒情主題以這種方式重復著，有時感覺就像你在聽同一首歌的10個版本。盡管最新單曲《Team》有一段更抓耳的副歌，但問題主要還是它的歌詞("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") 感覺是《Royals》棄用的歌詞?！禛lory and Gore》也是一樣的問題，缺乏新意地再次使用同樣的血腥/帝王/少年概念，但更大的問題在于Lorde過多地填塞了歌詞，使旋律變得沉重。然而，《Pure?Heroine》更討人喜歡的還是未經(jīng)壓抑的沖動感——盡管Lorde生命中四分之一的時間都會在唱片合約中度過，但你可以感受到她仍有很大的潛力，并磨練出自己自成一派的歌曲創(chuàng)作風格。這些歌曲都感覺像是由一個非常早熟的青少年譜寫的，這是歌曲魅力的很大一部分成因。

Pure Heroine is a decidedly post-internet album. Some of that has to do with its genre-agnostic blend of influences (in her live show Lorde has been covering both Kanye West and the Replacements, and her music is being marketed to a generation of people who in no way find that weird), but it’s mostly a comment on a certain kind of sensibility of self-presentation in the characters it deftly depicts. "It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care," she boasts on "Tennis Court". As the song goes on, though, cracks in the facade begin to show. "We're so happy even when we're smiling out of fear,” she admits, but at least “it looks alright in the pictures."

《Pure?Heroine》無疑是一張后互聯(lián)網(wǎng)時代的專輯。盡管這與它受到各種混雜流派的影響有關(guān)（Lorde在現(xiàn)場翻唱過Kanye West 和換牌樂隊（the?Replacements）的歌，她的音樂面向的是一代認為這不足為奇的聽眾），但更重要的原因是它主要是對表達對一種展現(xiàn)自我敏感性的看法。?"It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care," 她在《Tennis Court》中吹擂道，然而，隨著歌曲的推進，裝點門面的裂縫開始顯現(xiàn)。"We're so happy even when we're smiling out of fear,” 她坦言，但至少?“it looks alright in the pictures."

What’s fueling Pure Heroine is a tension between the tweet and the truth, the cumulative effect of the little digital fictions we craft for ourselves daily. But "Ribs" is the best song that this very promising songwriter has written so far because—even at the risk of seeming uncool— it gradually allows the walls to crumble. "It feels so crazy, getting old," she sighs at the beginning, in a smoky pantomime of maturity and detachment—sort of like a sepia-toned Instagram filter applied to her voice. Soon, though, the beat ramps up and the song turns into an impressionistic swirl of memories: "The drink you spilled all over me/ 'Lover’s Spit' left on repeat." She gets so caught up in the feeling that she lets herself blurt something truly vulnerable: "I've never felt more alone/ It feels so scary, getting old." Lorde’s music is quietly wise to a particular modern irony: Beneath every #DGAF there’s a person who secretly gives a fuck about something, and behind every anti-pop song there’s a singer who—just like everybody else—knows what it’s like to feel happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.

《Pure?Heroine》的驅(qū)動力是推文和真相之間的壓力，是我們?nèi)粘樽约壕幵斓碾娮有≌f的累積效應。但《Ribs》是這位前途似錦的歌手目前寫出的最好的歌 因為——冒著外表不炫酷的風險——它逐步打破藩籬"It feels so crazy, getting old,"她在歌曲開頭嘆氣道，一出成熟與超然的煙霧啞劇——有點像Instagram上給她的聲音配上的深褐色濾鏡。但很快，節(jié)奏加快，歌曲變?yōu)橛∠笾髁x的記憶漩渦"The drink you spilled all over me/ 'Lover’s Spit' left on repeat."?她如此沉迷于這種感覺，以至于她讓自己脫口而出一些真正脆弱的東西："I've never felt more alone/ It feels so scary, getting old."?Lorde的音樂巧妙地詮釋了一種特殊的現(xiàn)代諷刺：在每一個標簽#DGAF的背后，都有一個偷偷地在乎這件事的人；在每一首反流行歌曲的背后，都有一個歌手——就像其他人一樣——知曉同時感到快樂、自由、困惑和孤獨的感覺。