The best bit of Green Light - Lorde
Lorde of the (sad) Dance
Overture
Omg, hi, guys! (And hello new subscribers!) Are you so annoyed that I haven’t posted for a while, or did you literally not notice because you’re a fully fleshed out human being with an actual life and a soul and other emails to read? If the latter, good for you! If the former: that’s a bit intense tbqph, but sorry all the same.
But srsly, hello. Welcome! Has much been going on in the world of music lately, really? I’d actually heard of this year’s Mercury Prize winner - that was a morale boost. And we’re all dressing up as ‘dynamic ticket pricing’, for Halloween, right? I personally think we should do away with Ticketmaster and all his other cronies all together and go back to basics: put a band in a field, anyone can turn up, so long as they answer 45 simple questions correctly about the back catalogue of that artist’s work.
Anyway, gig stresses aside, what banger shall we queue up for today?
Today’s song | Green Light – Lorde
Although we’re all still reeling from Lorde working it out in the remix with Charli XCX, today, we visit the wise-beyond-her-years pop sage in her Melodrama era back in 2017. And oh boy, was this a bolt from the blue (or in this case, green!) after her lo-fi dreampop first album, Pure Heroine. Now, with producer Jack Antonoff under her belt (everybody needs one at some point!) our alt-pop sorceress was going up-tempo with this soaring lead single. The previously intimate sounds of Lorde were beginning to open up. She was out of the Tennis Court and hitting the club! But in a profound, melancholic way, obv.
The (whole lotta) history
After casually achieving international stardom with her debut album at just 16, New Zealand-based Lorde immediately launched into the scene as a pop powerhouse, without even going that poppy. Instead, her 2013 first album evoked mature, night-time synths and moody electronica, while at the time, the likes of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift were indulging in more bombastic affairs, such as Roar and I Knew You Were Trouble. Taylor would eventually evolve her sound into feeling wistful in a forest, while Katy stayed exactly the same. Lorde, on the other hand, was years ahead of her time, keeping it low-key and more informal in both production and lyrics, and talking it up like, yeah. (Yeah.)
By the time we got to album no.2 in 2017, Lorde was ready to dance – shocking all the sad girls in their bedrooms to their core (don’t worry loves, Billie Eilish was on her way!) and released Green Light: a huge song, embracing the euphoria of getting over an ex. But unlike the I Knew You Were Troubles and Roars of the world, this empowering anthem felt different, more carefree, deeper somehow. In fact, more like an anti-anthem. There was something a bit wonky about it - the chorus was in a weird place, the structure of the song felt off-kilter. It was a dancepop banger, certainly, but in a Lorde sort of way.
The perfect moment
When you’re heartbroken – you don’t need to rhyme!
Yes, today’s perfect pop moment comes only 25 seconds into the song - long before the rapturous bass and strings have even kicked in, long before Lorde starts hanging out of an Uber in a luxurious (but still sad!) sort of way.
When we start listening to Green Light – we think we’re in familiar territory, even with the music video. Once again, like with her first slew of singles, there’s Lorde filmed in close-up singing to us just like she did in Royals, with a stripped-back production. But wait, something’s different now. She’s angry! This isn’t casual! We’re not talking it up like, yeah (yeah!) anymore!
She’s doing her make-up in somebody else’s car and drinking different drinks in the same bar!?! And she knows what somebody did and wants to scream the truth? Wait, what’s going to rhyme with truth, then? We must know! What – “Liar”?! But that doesn’t rhyme with truth! Toto, we’re not in rhyming couplets anymore. And at this point in the song and the music video, the new era of Lorde begins to crash in – as she morosely walks out of a dingy bathroom and into the dazzling (but still sad!) strobes of the nightclub.
That’s the joy of Green Light – a song full of rug-pull moments, taking Lorde away from the low-key ennui of Pure Heroine into something more powerful, all the while still retaining those darker undertones that made Lorde’s stuff so striking in the first place.
The beauty of this lyric is that it’s so specific while only telling a fragment of the story – we somehow know so much about this break-up already. You’ve probably had a similar experience with an ex - watching them change, or pretend to change, after the disintegration.
The way Lorde says “damn liar” with such visceral hate is gorgeous to hear - even the piano stops playing when she says it. The song is shocked at itself. From this point, the production starts to amp up - the vocal harmonies begin to join Lorde, pulling her out of this moment of loneliness into a new, more honest place. Girl is backing herself up.
Interestingly, power-pop producer Max Martin told Lorde that Green Light had “incorrect songwriting”, deploying strange techniques such as a key-change in the pre-chorus. Brilliantly, being critiqued by one of the most influential megaminds of modern pop music didn’t phase Lorde at all: the rules continued to be broken and this twisted banger came out of the wreckage.
On the song, Lorde told the BBC that Green Light is “a break-up song, even though it doesn’t sound like a break-up song”, describing the track as her way of moving on from the collapse of a relationship with a long-term boyfriend - while the accompanying album served as a documentation of her “proper year of adulthood”.
"Writing Pure Heroine was my way of enshrining our teenage glory, putting it up in lights forever so that part of me never dies.”
"This record - well, this one is about what comes next.
"The party is about to start. I am about to show you the new world.”
Final pop ponderings
At some point in any prolific music artist’s life, they are likely to flirt with a Sad Banger – a song featuring a totes emosh subject matter that still manages to muster a decent BPM level. They’re sad! But we’re still bopping to their falling tears. Sad Bangers have been around forever. Arguably, ABBA perfected the medium back in the 70s and 80s – Dancing Queen, SOS, Knowing Me, Knowing You are all lyrically devastating – but all sufficiently head-sway-able at the same time.
The 2010s in particular seemed particularly rife with Sad Bangers (everyone a bit down-in-the-dumps after the financial crisis? Could people sense the oncoming storm of Brexit and Trump?) and you could argue that Robyn reignited the trend at the start of the decade with the unforgettable Dancing on My Own. Since then, we’ve had Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball, Ariana Grande’s One Last Time and – let’s be honest – pretty much everything Lana Del Rey has ever put out – but particularly that Cedric Gervais remix of Summertime Sadness, which really, really slaps. (Sadly, of course!)
Lorde recorded Green Light to help her move on from a relationship with joyful catharsis - and she did so with a rule-breaking dance record rather than a straight-up piano ballad. We’ve seen it before with Cher’s Believe and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. This inversion of what sadness can be (yes, it’s sad - but also a release! A green light, if you will!) is why we love our Lorde - always a little bit ahead of the curve. No wonder David Bowie called her the “future of music”.
And just think: if a simple guest-verse has had us in a chokehold all year, lord(e) knows what we can expect to come next from this one. We give you the Green Light to let us know, queen!