Diseased (see: gifted) with the particularly atypical condition of sound-to-colour synaesthesia, for the New Zealand born pop-star Lorde, writing songs is an experience more ocular than musical. “From the moment I start something, I can see the finished song, even if it’s far-off and foggy,” said she.

To her, the process is more about correcting than making music. It’s tweaking and regulating the leaks, chording colours and toning shapes until she hears the yield she sees. Lyrical inspiration sourced to her more from eavesdropping conversations of strangers in New York, than from the first hit of heartbreak she freshly adventured.

It’s a record more about solitude than about desolation. “The album,” she said, “is about being alone, both the good and the bad parts.” This successor to her surprisingly incandescent debut is a cohesive concept album. The detached, observing 15 year-old in ‘Pure Heroine’, finally “went to the party and got drunk.” “[It’s] that drunken girl at the party, dancing around and crying about her ex-boyfriend, who everyone thinks is a mess. That’s her tonight and tomorrow she starts to rebuild,” she spoke of the album.

The purpose was to pursue the assorted moods experienced in the course of the same house party, from ecstasy to self-detestation, to chase after the shadows of youthful, night-time mood scales. “With a party,” she explained, “there’s that moment where a great song comes on and you’re ecstatic, and then there’s that moment later on where you’re alone in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, you don’t think you look good, and you start feeling horrible.”

Her new demos were auditioned through cheap ear buds on subway rides, to understand how her music would sound among the clamours of everyday life. Although drumbeats built the songs up in ‘Pure Heroine’, the bricks of this new album are the classicist keys of the piano.

‘Melodrama’ claims an alarmingly dramatic, glaringly depressing, bold and thoughtful artwork by Sam McKinniss as its cover, and can entirely be played acoustically. Lorde remains awe-struck by the genre of pop, distinctively relating to it in both investigative and intuitive ways, in a time when many of her contemporaries have deemed it the ‘genre of the dumb.’ Music by people like Katy Perry and Rihanna has inspired her monumentally in the birth of her own new compositions.

The mechanics of her songs, in particular of her crowning single, “Royals”, are artlessly tender, with unhurried beats and revised harmonies. The new singles “Green Light” and “Liability” reflect entirely introspective side of her music, one that highlights the talent of her young age. This album that tells the camouflaged tale of Lorde’s past two “wild, fluorescent” adult years is set to be released on 16 June, 2017.

Ex-Mahadevi Birla World Academy