Lorde somehow takes all of the sadness, apathy, and confusion of a generation and turns it into Pure Heroine. Instead of generic, bubbly love songs, Lorde accurately represents seemingly all sides of the teenage spectrum. She breaks down the classic “invincible teen” image and calls out the truth: behind every Don’t-Give-No-F**ks adolescent, there is a person who cares about something and has fears and dreams and sadness just like everyone else. She brings this contradiction to life, singing “It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care” then immediately after, “We’re so happy even when we’re smiling out of fear.” Lorde expresses the harsh reality of our generation, calling out the reckless young adults as what we all really are: “We’re reeling through the midnight streets and I’ve never felt more alone. It feels so scary getting old.”
There are times I’ll sit and talk about Pure Heroine with my friends, and I’ll look around at all of us and feel almost cliché. We are the full spectrum of Pure Heroine, hitting all aspects and everywhere in between. Sometimes I feel like the most DGAF person on the planet, while also at times feeling so empty – like I’m missing something or trying to find something. Lorde sings “We might be hollow, but we’re brave,” and I’ll look around my group of friends and the ways each of us respectively kill that hollow feeling and think is this what makes us brave? and then wonder if that is part of Lorde’s motive. She makes us question what we’re really about and what we really want. In “Team” she sings, “I’m kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care.” But maybe she’s saying, “reveled.” It’s hard to tell. Is our bravery rebelling or reveling? Is our hollowness deriving from our boredom or is it the other way around?
Sometimes the album feels like the same song over and over again: a sad commentary on teenagers and how she is apart from it while also totally a part of it. But as you look deeper, each song has its own take on the generation. The different viewpoints of each song are what make Pure Heroine brilliant. In “Team” she is bored and reckless while in “400 Lux” she is bored and empty. In “White Teeth Teens” she is looking in from the outside, but in “Glory and Gore” she is on the inside of the clique, fighting herself and seemingly everyone around her. Every song on the album hits a different pressure point.
Lorde physically manifests her emotive lyrics in her track listing, setting the album so each song builds off of the one that precedes it. The continuity of the album can be seen most clearly in the last four songs: “Glory and Gore,” “Still Sane,” “White Teeth Teens,” and “A World Alone” (respectively). Lorde, fighting from the inside, sing-snarls, “now we’re in the ring and we’re coming for blood” in “Glory and Gore,” then transitions to her most vulnerable state: “Still Sane.” In “Still Sane” she questions her job, her emotions, herself, and basically everything around her. In a breathy whisper she questions, “only bad people live to see their likeness set in stone, what does that make me?” In “White Teeth Teens” she seems to find herself, referencing the fighting from “Glory and Gore” by singing “give the bruises out like gifts,” but coming to terms and realizing she is “not a white teeth teen.”
“A World Alone” closes the album in a semi-content fashion, tying together all of the other songs that come before it. She pulls together every piece, hitting each emotion in one song. She references her confusion by singing “I feel grown up with you in your car, I know it’s dumb” and referencing the same battle of “Glory and Gore” in the words: “they all wanna get rough – get away with it.” She takes the foolish courage seen in “Royals” and “Ribs” and negates it, singing, “I know we’re not everlasting; we’re a train-wreck waiting to happen.” While in “White Teeth Teens” she is happy to have gotten out, in “A World Alone” she is coming to terms with her own emotions and the elaborate sorrow that fills an entire generation.
Perhaps her stance on the complexity and desperate carelessness of today’s youth is best summed up in her opening the album with “Don’t you thing that it’s boring how people talk?” and her closing off the album with the abrupt ending: “Let them talk.”