There’s going to be a healthy — unhealthy? — amount of words spilled across digital pages dissecting Solar Power, the new album from Lorde that arrives today (August 20) after more than four years of impatience, the equivalence of a damn near eternity in the pop world. Three singles have teased the album, including this week’s LP appetizer “Mood Ring,” and there’s been plenty of debate over how those singles stand up to the New Zealand alt-pop dynamo’s gripping early work, particularly tracks like “Royals” and “Tennis Court” that launched her as a teenager to instant icon status.
But those Solar Power singles, “Mood Ring” joined by June’s title track and July’s “Stoned at the Nail Salon”, were mere placeholders and chapters rather than singles in the sense we digest music as a commodity in 2021. Now at the ripe age of 24 and delivering at once her most basic and complex album to date, Lorde has shunned the culture of the moment, defied the urging to cater to evaporating attention spans, and delivered an album’s album at a time when the album is the unsexiest of beasts. The first two singles that were maligned as stand-alone releases now feel organically enriched in the context of this delicate and atmospheric album, and the percussively propulsive “Mood Ring”, vibing as the closest thing to a traditional single your cool aunt would love the most, is buried down at Track 11 of the 12-song LP.
That’s probably by design. Public sentiment would likely be different going to bed last night had “Mood Ring” dropped before Independence Day, when summer’s glowing optimism had not yet faded into our permanent gray that begins and ends every monotonous August day that feels hauntingly like every monotonous day of the months that came before. Time has stood still since last March; and Solar Power seems poised to break that cycle by giving us something to define the day with.
“The album is a celebration of the natural world, an attempt at immortalizing the deep, transcendent feelings I have when I’m outdoors,” Lorde says. “In times of heartache, grief, deep love, or confusion, I look to the natural world for answers. I’ve learned to breathe out, and tune in. This is what came through.”
Like any outdoors trip that’s not walking to the mailbox or taking an Uber to Target, the destination takes time to achieve, a distance to arrive and a distance to return, fraught with cliches about appreciating the journey. It’s longer than a three-minute pop song, more impactful than an add on a Spotify playlist, and entrenches a feeling of purpose deeper into a colorful memory than the quick key bumps we’ve plugged into our forced social lives in the era of Zoom and DMs.
When Lorde speaks of the outdoors, to this writer she’s also speaking of time, as nature and time are so inextricably weaved, and the investment it takes to truly be free of all the things that weigh us down in 2021. This year, like the devil predating it, the outdoors was a forbidden place, a danger zone that could absolutely kill you once you let your guard down. The natural world has become very unnatural unless we extend ourselves to seek out what remains uncharted to our personal growth and development. There’s still beauty in places not shadowed by a ceiling overhead, and that exoticism is no longer relegated to far off lands, sandy beaches, and airborne vacations as the accessible world shrinks by the day. The world Lorde summons with an outstretched hand on the Solar Power exists the moment we step outside, embracing the organic beauty around us, and it gains momentum with each step we take further from the ledge in reclaiming parts of ourselves along the way.
The further we go, the better our lives are, and if we firmly believe in where we are going and what we are doing, it’s usually a risk worth taking. Almost like dropping an album in the age of the single.