Revisiting Lorde’s Pure Heroine Ten Years Later

Elena Fry-Hernandez - Music Editor

“Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?” a fifteen year old Lorde sings, wise beyond her years. Her debut record opens with this question. It’s been a decade since Lorde’s Pure Heroine hit the airwaves and forever altered the lives of those who tuned in. The album, arguably one of the most influential to come from the 2010s, was the soundtrack to many angsty pre-teen lives. It spawned smash-hits like “Team” and “Royals”, the latter of which just became the highest certified track by a lead female artist in RIAA history (13x platinum). The track is wrought with several classic Lorde motifs like references to teeth and jewels. It also features a heavy bass and rich harmonies, other Lorde staples. It details her complicated relationship with fame, a theme we see again later on in “Still Sane”. “I still like hotels / but I think that’ll change / still like hotels / and my newfound fame / promise I can stay good,” she ponders. A fear of the future hangs around in this track. She goes on to ask, “only bad people live to see / their likeness set in stone / what does that make me?”

Fear of the future is another recurring theme throughout the record. On the prophetical “Ribs”, she prematurely mourns her adolescence. The track opens with a hypnotizing synth that drones on for almost an entire minute, until it releases into a thumping bass. It almost replicates the muffled sound of music you’d hear playing in the other room of a houseparty, while you hold your friend’s hair back in the bathroom. Lyrically, the song is quite simple. During the first verse, she slowly sings, “the drink you spilt all over me / ‘lover’s spit’ left on repeat / my mom and dad let me stay home / it drives you crazy / getting old.” The chorus ends up being the exact same except sung faster this time. During the bridge, she chants as if she’s casting a spell: “I want ‘em back / the minds we had / it’s not enough to feel the lack / I want ‘em back,” a wish to return to simpler times. Finally, she laments, “you’re the only friend I need / sharing beds like little kids / and laughing till our ribs get tough / but that will never be enough.” These four lines are repeated and bring us to the song’s end. On the album’s ten-year anniversary, Lorde shared her feelings about the milestone in an email to fans. She wrote, “You may (like me most of the time) hold the opinion that this album has been MYTHOLOGIZED QUITE ENOUGH, but a milestone is a milestone.” She also went on to say she has “a deep respect for the vision of the little one making [the album].” She closed her email with a reminder to anyone reading that “everything starts out as a bunch of bullsh*t in a laptop…if you can trust that the first impulse you had to create came from a place of deep wisdom…you’ll have something special on your hands.” Now twenty six years old, Lorde reminds us in her message that “Pure Heroine exists because I had the tiniest inkling of what I’ve now come to see as one of my guiding principles: that each of us have a handful of songs inside us that are ours, and only ours, to sing…you are sitting on a gold mine that no one can rob. Whatever that means to you, whatever that statement you were born to make is, I invite you to take a big breath and make it.” Without a doubt, Pure Heroine has raised an entire generation.  These listeners have grown over the years with the record and Lorde herself. The album’s closing track leaves us with the reminder “the people are talking”, but Lorde shuts those voices down with a simple statement: “Let ‘em talk.”