I’ve been a fan of Lorde and of Melodrama as an album since 2018, a year after the album’s initial release. I had just started going to house parties in May of that year and rinsed songs from the album for all that they were worth, ensuring they were played at least once on every one of these nights because back then, I saw Melodrama as nothing but a collection of (mostly) fun, pop adjacent songs to be played loud in rooms full of my friends whilst we drank underage and gossiped about who we all fancied (Just as Ella Yelich-O’Connor aka Lorde had intended, FYI, the album concept is built around an evening at a house party).
It wasn’t until earlier this year that this album would become something more to me than one full of songs designed to soundtrack drunken antics in someone else’s garden. It became an extreme source of comfort in the aftermath of my first breakup, to hear someone of a similar age (at the time of the album release) singing about overcoming all these huge feelings a breakup brings with it during the period when I genuinely believed that relationship was the be-all and end-all of where I stood in life at that point in time, was (and still is), a constant reminder that relationships don’t define who you are or the experiences you will go on to have forever. They’re simply just connections you make that allow you to continue growing into the person you want to be.
There are many tracks on the record that echo the events of my own life, the idea in ‘Green Light’ of being so wrapped up in the intensity of the breakup that you wait for signs from the world that it’s okay to move on is one. My own ‘green light’ moment came in the form of a 96-hour long trip to London to stay with my cousin two weeks after the breakup happened, I got on the train expecting those four days to be a temporary distraction from the way that I was feeling but instead, they changed my attitude towards the entire situation. We went out clubbing and I ended up kissing one of her friends, that kiss was the catalyst for the realisation that the end of that relationship wasn’t the end of me, and it certainly wasn’t the end of the world. It was just an opportunity for me to figure out what I want from the world and the people I choose to surround myself with. ‘Writer in the Dark’ and ‘Hard Feelings/Loveless fuelled similar revelations, Ella’s echoes of “I ride the subway, read the signs / I let the seasons change my mind / I love it here since I’ve stopped needing you” in the former stuck out to me especially when I moved back to Manchester for the start of the new university term – I walked along each street with ease and said yes to nights out without hesitation, it became far easier to exist once I had fallen in love with this city and stopped associating it with bad arguments and the taste of my own tears.
The easily accessible portrayal of adolescence across Melodrama means there’s something there for everyone to pick out and tune in with, whether that’s the idea that you feel too much for another person just as the singer does in ‘Liability’ or the love letter to having one of those all-consuming crushes in the form of ‘The Louvre’. It’s an album for anyone who’s ever shared a connection with another person and even after all this time out in the big, wide world, it still feels like the musical equivalent of a long, tight hug from an old friend.