Morning light creeps in through a cracked window. A dark-haired woman lies semi-conscious under white bedsheets. She looks toward you stormily. The party is over. Friends have gone home. A new day is dawning. 

This is the sophomore record of Ella Yelich-O’Connor — better known as Lorde. Melodrama tells the story of an exuberant house-party and overlays this with the emotional highs and lows of a breakup. From the feverish highs of “Sober” and “Homemade Dynamite” to the grievous comedowns of “Liability” and “Sober II (Melodrama),” the album is imbued with sadness, loneliness, confusion, and heartbreak. As fans of the album know, locked behind the distorted synthesizers are visceral fragments of memory that pledge the importance of youth and the power of emotion. Vulnerable, brazen, and, at times, opaque, Melodrama captures the fragility and intensity of young romance with rare clarity. 

“I do my makeup in somebody else’s car,” she begins, and the album opens into a night brimming with expectation. The album’s first track and lead single, “Green Light,” deals with the longing to move on after a breakup. The desire to move beyond our internal selves and into the world afresh is a feeling our generation can relate to with particular vehemence. Especially as we are forced into solitary introspection, “Green Light” encapsulates our yearning for activity, while acknowledging how our pasts can complicate this desire. We search for a moment of blissful anesthesia, where our pasts desert us, and we can feel the joy of the weightless future. 

“The Louvre” is a lush track that captures what it’s like to get lost in a new relationship. Suddenly, if only for a fleeting moment, you feel as though you’re part of something bigger than yourself. Best of all, you can forget your existential dread with the balm of canonization, because, you state assuredly, “They’ll hang us in the Louvre / Down the back, but who cares, still the Louvre.” 

On “Liability,” notes of muted piano puncture the otherwise still track, sonically capturing the quietness that comes in the wake of a lover’s departure. The track focuses on the feeling of being too much for someone, being too wild, and ending up feeling alone and used. The question of how to relate to others, and the extent to which others truly care, plagues our generation with particular fervour, especially as we learn new ways to form relationships from cities or even countries, apart. We worry endlessly that we’ll pull ourselves from our isolation only for our faults, our liabilities, to catch up with us, and leave us more confused and alone than before. 

This personal reckoning gets pushed further on the song’s twin, “Liability (Reprise),” ten songs down the tracklist. The reprise is a deeper and murkier rumination on the same question of identity. The gospel influences on the track suggest that this is a spiritual question. Lorde talks about the dreams of youth that “get harder” as time goes on, and concedes, that sometimes “you’re not what you thought you were.” As with the bulk of Lorde’s discography, the playful transmutes into the bloody: “Maybe all this is the party / Maybe we just do it violently.” 

The violence takes a place in the quotidian in Lorde’s universe. In “Homemade Dynamite,” she imagines a car crash that occurs while she and a group of friends attempt to drive while drunk. “We’ll end up painted on the road / Red and chrome / All the broken glass sparkling,” she sings, before adding cavalierly: “I guess we’re partying.” Casual violence on Lorde’s album renders a world where death is never far away. This is not depicted as frightening but merely as a fact of the landscape. When mortality is an insouciant matter, the stakes of the world are very high. The party is a matter of life and death. This night, this drink, this lover, all take on a grander theatrical quality. This is melodrama, after all. Artworks like Melodrama don’t merely encapsulate what it’s like to be nineteen and “on fire” in our generation. Instead, they go on to shape and inform the attitudes of the very culture they sought to capture. This is to say that years from now, when we’re much older, when our own children are beginning to wonder about love and heartbreak, Melodrama will still linger on the fringes of our minds, like it once clung like smoke to our dorm room walls.