Nice summer single. Is she going for Beatles-style controversy by singing, "I’m kind of like a prettier Jesus"?
It's been growing on me the more I play it. I quite like it - especially the last minute with all the harmonising!
Wow, has any recent artist fallen so far so quickly as Lorde? “Royals” and her debut album heralded the arrival of a smart new lyric voice, but, on her second album, the tunes just weren’t there, and this … this is ghastly. I thought I was watching the new Ariana Grande video. As with Billie Eilish, the makeover from sort of interesting and different artist to bog standard video sex kitten is surprising. I’m all for sex, I like sex, and she’s certainly cute in this video, but there’s just no there there to the song, to my ears.
I'm not sold on this new one yet, but I honestly thought her last album really good. I still spin "Green Light" and "The Louvre" regularly. I absolutely hated "Royals" and thought it was one of the worst pop singles in a long time, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Melodrama overall.
Love it. She's made some fabulous singles -- "Royals" was a great single, "Green Light" was a great single. And I really like this one on first listen. Love the sunny, anti-goth post-pandemic pop. Just the right mood for the moment.
Yes, if what the world needs right now to get through the current moment is a return to Duran Duran’s yuppie yacht rock beach vibe.
what's so sexy about this video? sure, she's young and attractive, but she's not even showing that much skin.
Wasn't too warm on it after my first listen, will revisit it again in a bit. First impressions were it sounded kinda similar to George Michael's "Faith" or "Freedom," no?
I have to say, I don't hear anything similar about he two records, but chilling on the beach in the sun in the summer is never going to get old as a theme for a pop song, or as anything.
I like the song and the cover reads more like fun and freedom than sex to me. It looks like she’s in motion, perhaps leaping. I think it matches the song well too.
I have to say, I am so over darkness in pop culture, and the need for things to be dark and gritty and morally ambivalent to be taken seriously; and having just lived through a year and a half of global darkness in real life, and I'm completely ready for this single (and its really easy feeling groove, and throwing the cellphone in the ocean and not being able to be reached). Maybe it's just me, but if there are, as I suspect there are, millions of people out there feeling that way, this single will blow up.
Cool song. Nice tribute to Free with the cover. Should be a fun listen. Lots of interesting creative music out here it seems
As with someone’s recent comment in another thread that Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul,” written and recorded before the pandemic, “caught the mood of the pandemic,” I think there may be a fallacy at work here. Given that Lorde’s last album came out in 2017, and she’s presumably been working on the follow-up since then, “Solar Power” may well have been written and recorded before the pandemic, and not as a response to it. Clicking on my phone to watch Lorde cavort on the beach on YouTube in a glossy, carefully staged high budget major label video strikes me as the opposite of “throwing my cellphone into the ocean,” but if you or anyone else takes this as a fun in the sun anthem to help us all heal from the scars of the pandemic, so be it, I guess that’s one way of reading it.
But also keep in mind that she is in New Zealand which, to put in mildly, had a much different response to the pandemic than most countries. It's been closer to "post-pandemic" there than it has been for most of us US and European posters. So I think it's a not unreasonable reading.
I just find the urge to map every new cultural production onto the pandemic hilarious. Again, maybe she intended this to be her positive, upbeat response to the end of lockdown, that could well be the case. But, again, given that it’s been nearly five years since her last album, maybe this was in the can two years ago and we are simply projecting our thoughts about the pandemic onto it. Not everything is or has to be “about the pandemic.”
Whenever she made it, why every she made it, released as it was deliberately at this time at her new lead single, with that theme and visual look (no gothy Lorde here), into this world, post-pandemic, in a popular full of dark, gritty, morally ambiguous anti-heroes, a goes-down-easy-as-water, lite-groove, throw-your-cell-in-the-ocean, chilling-at-the-beach, song called "Solar Power" feels just right for now in a way that great hit pop singles do when they hit at just the moment. I'm all in and so ready for it, (just like I'm all in an so ready for a trip to the beach, and maybe it would have been as perfect in any early summer, but maybe not). FWIW, I don't really understand how Dylan's rambling, free association on theme of the death of the culture of the '50s and '60s "caught the mood of the pandemic" at all. That's a mysterious response to that song, in my opinion.
