After many teasers and much speculation, Lorde released her new song, “Green Light,” last Thursday. It’s the first original music she’s released in 3 years, since her debut album Pure Heroine, and it’s definitely got a different feel–but fans and critics are loving it.
“Green Light” is an upbeat pop track that begs to be danced to. In the song’s music video, also released Friday, we see a side of Lorde that didn’t show up in her original album.
The song begins with intense, piano-backed lyrics about the hurt and lies of a broken relationship. But about 50 seconds in, the beat picks up, and both Lorde in her video and fans around the world get up and move.
Lorde singing it out in her new video.
This song is all about broken relationships, likely inspired by the singer’s breakup with James Lowe, her boyfriend of 3-years, which she calls her “first major heartbreak.” But with such heavy content, why is this song so upbeat and fun? Lorde admitted that she had similar thoughts, saying in an interview with Beats 1/Apple Music’s Zane Lowe: “I thought, ‘How is this thing coming out so joyous-sounding?’ And I realized it was like, ‘This is that drunk girl at the party dancing around, crying about her ex-boyfriend, that everyone thinks is a mess. That’s tonight and tomorrow, she starts to rebuild.”
This single is nothing like the intense, broody music from “Pure Heroine,” but hasn’t lost the edge and uniqueness that made us fall in love with Lorde when Royals first topped the charts. We have a feeling that there is more to the story that this song and video starts, and her second album “Melodrama,” coming out this summer, is sure to fill in some blanks. But until then, we’ve got the “green light” to fall in love with Lorde all over again.