LET THE SUN IN

Why ‘Solar Power’ is (secretly) Lorde’s best album

By Addison Schmidt

Photo By Haley Krawczyk

A wave of impending doom is falling over the collective, both in our lives and on our screens. So, we march and protest and write. But even in our actions, intrinsic happiness feels hard to find. 

This begs the question, is happiness extinct, or are we just looking for it in the wrong places? 

In 2021, Ella Yelich O’Connor — better known by her stage name Lorde — tried to answer that question with Solar Power, her third studio album. Lorde’s claim to fame followed her hit single “Royals,” featured on her 2014 album Pure Heroine, which won Song of the Year at the 2014 Grammy Awards. 

Masked by dark purple lipstick and black clothing, Lorde’s lyrics articulated the angst and unrest of a generation. Songs like “Ribs,” “Supercut,” “Writer in the Dark,” and “White Teeth Teens” spoke with the kind of cruel, unflinching clarity only possessed by a teenager with a chip on her shoulder. 

Lorde’s fans — myself included — had put her into a creative box and stamped her with the title of a clairvoyant cynic. If nothing else could be counted on in society, her music could tell an entire generation exactly how to feel, when to feel it, and why. 

But Solar Power — a sun-soaked, oceanic exodus marked by beachy visuals and stripped-down acoustics — took those preconceived notions and threw them to the wind. Without notifying her followers, she’d done what feels so impossible to do these days: let the sun in. 

The initial fan reaction to Solar Power was poor. Reflecting on the reaction a year later, Lorde said in an email to her followers that the initial response was “really confounding and at times painful to sit with at first.” Fans called the album “overbleached” and “undercooked.” Pitchfork described the album as “soft and loose and textureless.”

However, if you look beyond the summer aesthetics and washed-out melodies, you’ll find a deeper meaning: The album is Lorde’s attempt to make sense of the life that we create after the oblivion of our teenage years, an attempt to prove happiness does exist, even when all we can see is heartache. 

In “Stoned in the Nail Salon,” Lorde describes the ghost of regret that lingers behind the choices she’s made as she’s gotten older. In “Man With the Axe,” the album is stripped down completely, and in a single sentence, Lorde comes clean: “I thought I was a genius…but now I’m twenty two.” 

While Lorde’s source material is heavy, what she makes of it is not. On all Solar Power songs, the resolution proves positive: Regret is inevitable, but under our control. Grief is unstoppable, but representative of love that persists. Loving is painful, but always worth it. 

It’s almost a metaphor for what we’re dealing with on our screens and in our lives. We’d do better by following Lorde’s example — not sheltering ourselves from heartache, but finding purpose within it. 

Solar Power is a tour-de-force demonstration that pain, a crucial part of the human experience, is not a death sentence, but a lens for creativity. And joy, as elusive as it often seems, is only absent when we’re unwilling to look for it.  

It’s a good answer to that initial question. Maybe happiness has been here all along. It’s just up to us to find it.