Lorde Strips Down to Start Over

Lorde is contemporary pop’s greatest demystifier, and also its greatest mystic. This contradiction has animated her music from the beginning. “We aren’t caught up in your love affair,” she declared in 2013’s “Royals,” taking a defiant stance against the world of pop-culture glamour—only to spend the rest of her début album making her own inverted version of that same world, an endless Vevo of the mind, populated by partying teen-agers “livin’ in ruins of a palace within my dreams.” On the album “Solar Power,” which was released in 2021, she set her sights on New Age wellness culture with the same mixture of distrust and sympathy, one moment making fun of an acquaintance for exchanging hard drugs for yoga, the next singing about her own powers of manifestation: “I can make anything real.” Although her lithe voice and melodic sensibility have set the agenda for much alternative-leaning pop music of the past decade and a half—practically creating the whole category—it is above all this ability to slip between enchantment and disenchantment, breaking down myths and replacing them with new ones, that sets Lorde apart.