Lorde

Well she's been parodied by Weird Al now, so that's it: it's all been said, and you can skip the rest of this. Nonetheless, I don't care that this post is a year late: I need to talk about Lorde's Pure Heroine, because I'm obsessed with it, I've barely been able to listen to anything else lately. Listen: imagine if Leonard Cohen got reincarnated as a 16-year-old female Kanye West and Lana Del Rey fan from the suburbs of New Zealand. I mean, I know I don't know shit about music, but compare "Everybody Knows" to "Buzzcut Season": isn't it the same airless, ironic, elegant pop fatalism? What about "First We Take Manhattan" and "Glory and Gore": that arch, overtly erotic charade of aggression? Not saying all her songs hit the level of Cohen's best, but…she was 15 when she wrote "Royals". I'm so curious about what she'll come up with next.