Before there was Olivia Rodrigo, and before there was Billie Eilish, there was Lorde. This New Zealand-born and bred singer-songwriter shot to fame after the release of her Grammy-winning single “Royals,” and for several years in the aughts, she was pop music’s premiere teenager.
September 27, 2013 marked the 10th anniversary of Lorde’s debut album Pure Heroine. While the singer has followed up with two albums, 2017’s Melodrama and 2021’s Solar Power, the former of which was more critically acclaimed than her debut, nothing Lorde has released since Pure Heroine has made as big of an impact on pop culture. 10 years later, Pure Heroine remains both a cultural touchstone and a blueprint for a debut album.
Pure Heroine Disrupted Music
Pure Heroine was impactful the year it was released for a variety of reasons. Lorde’s sound was different than anything that was mainstream at the time – the year-end singles chart was topped by Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop,” Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive”; meanwhile albums like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, Kanye West’s Yeezus, and Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City were considered some of the best albums of the year. The New Zealander was also unafraid to be frank with her lyrics, tearing down the elite and the boring with sharp lines in a way that was surprising for someone of her age at the time.
But those don’t explain why Pure Heroine is still so beloved by fans. Sure, the album still has a different sound than what’s mainstream, but that doesn’t matter given its age, and Lorde is 10 years older now, so most aren’t considering her precociousness when listening. What makes Pure Heroine just as lovely to listen to all these years later as it was when it debuted is the musical universe Lorde created.
A Euphoric Listening Experience
Pure Heroine transports you to a different world. It’s magical yet real, uncertain yet safe. You’ll feel a myriad of emotions while listening, and though each emotion will stay only temporarily, you won’t feel whiplash, just an indescribable vibe that doesn’t come along often.
While it does have an element of nostalgia to it now, it’s just as relevant in 2023 as it was in 2013, and escaping into the Pure Heroine world feels just as good in 2023 as it did in 2013. And it will feel just as good in 2033.
Pure Heroine is streaming now wherever you listen to music.