The 2010s' Most Influential Pop Album Turns 10
Lorde's "Pure Heroine" revolutionized music, and it still sounds fresh today
“This record is about waiting for things, and boredom, and over analysis, and angst, and all that. But it’s also about bravery, about confidence, hatred and love. I poured my brain and heart into this, and maybe I’ll hate it in two years, because that’s the nature of being my age, but for now, it’s the most powerful thing I can give.”
— Lorde, Pure Heroine liner notes, 2013
Some pieces of art take their time to unravel, and their influence slowly becomes more and more apparent with each passing year. Others are instant landmarks, works that are novel yet feel like they’ve existed for decades.
The latter is Lorde’s 2013 debut album Pure Heroine, which turns 10 years old on Wednesday. It’s the single most influential pop album of the 2010s.
Popular music was one thing before its release, and something else after it. From the sound, to the lyrical themes, to inspiring several of today’s biggest musicians, rarely has there been such a distinct shift that one album — or one song — brings about.
I know this is not a hot take. In fact, it was largely the consensus surrounding Pure Heroine in 2013, and its stature has only grown since its release.
But I want to acknowledge that level of impact on its anniversary, how refreshing the album still sounds and how we’re waiting for something new to shift the music industry like it did.
“I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh”
A retrospective of Pure Heroine would feel wrong if it didn’t start with “Royals,” the game-changing lead single that serves as a microcosm for the entire project.
I’ve heard the song so much that it’s basically muzak to me at this point, but it’s still striking: the minimalist beat, the blunt critiques of mainstream cultural excess, the choral vocals. It rips into the plastic sheen of the unattainable celebrity lifestyle promoted by pop culture, something that’s just as relevant today as it was 10 years ago.
It feels real and relatable, with Lorde playing the everywoman living an anonymous middle-class life.
Those themes alone made the song stand out in 2013. But so did its sound.
Chris DeVille wrote a surprisingly prescient piece for Stereogum shortly after Pure Heroine’s release discussing the “monogenre,” the idea that modern music is becoming a synthesis of inspirations that don’t fit traditional genre boundaries. In it, he cites “Royals” as a prime example.
“The synth-heavy production and complex drum programming mirrors current indie production trends (hello, Purity Ring) as much as current rap production trends (hello, Noah “40” Shebib), and the overlapping hooks and harmonies are built for sing-alongs from Girl Scout camp on up,” he wrote.
Indeed, when the song was first shipped to American radio after a successful run in Lorde’s home country of New Zealand, it appeared on alternative and rock stations. She won an MTV Video Music Award for “Best Rock Video.”
I even heard it twice on my dad’s favorite station, the sadly now-defunct 103.1 WRNR out of Annapolis, which he always proudly claimed never played a song more than once.
It made some sense. “Royals” sounded like little else on the pop charts, and clearly had influence from indie pop, electronic and hip hop acts.
Today, the designation of what’s alternative vs. pop has only become murkier, thanks in part to “Royals” paving the way.
“[‘Royals’] signaled a change in the landscape of how songs needed to sound,” Pure Heroine producer Joel Little told Billboard in 2019 when the publication named “Royals” one of the 2010s’ defining songs. “Up until that point, there were faster tempos and more layers, those were the songs that were doing really well. And then we came out with a song that was just a voice and a minimal backdrop. That made people [realize] there’s power in telling a story that way.”
Power in restraint
The first sound you hear on Pure Heroine is a flat synth underscoring Lorde’s intimate vocals on “Tennis Court,” soon joined by chiptune blips.
It sets a stark, dark mood, one that’s purposefully simple so as to highlight her voice and lyrics.
That minimal production continues throughout the rest of the record and is Pure Heroine’s hallmark. It’s both spacious and personal, as Lorde and Little craft a frigid, escapist atmosphere that’s directly talking to the listener.
Yet, each track has its signature that makes it stand out. Take the siren-like synth on “400 Lux,” or the haunting build of choral vocals on “Ribs,” or the childlike xylophone of “Buzzcut Season,” or the marching drums of “White Teeth Teens,” or the echoing guitar of “A World Alone.”
Each element is spare but striking, the right piece to complement the songwriting. That production style became ubiquitous in the following years, and the shift felt both obvious and subtle.
I first began thinking about this when I watched a Middle 8 video in 2018 specifically focusing on “Royals’” impact on popular music. It goes a bit more into music theory and does a much better job of explaining how Lorde uses sounds to create a distinct mood than I ever will.
I think this line says it all: “It sits between this middle ground of excitement and passiveness. Her tone comes off both sarcastic and confident.”
And that’s applicable to the whole project.
The slower tempos and mixed emotions sounded out-of-place at the time but quickly became mainstream. This wave of “sad pop” coincided with those around Lorde’s age and younger (myself included) coming of age in troubling times.
It’s a “vibey” atmosphere of extremely simple origins. Most of the beats were initially drafts on GarageBand, and the album has a DIY feel to it that sounds obvious today but predates the rise of bedroom pop and SoundCloud rap.
Yet, it makes sense in context.
The No. 1 song in the U.S. when “Royals” debuted on the chart in July 2013 was Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (bet you haven’t thought about that garbage song in years). The year’s top hit was Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” Among 2013’s biggest stars: Miley Cyrus (“We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball”) and Katy Perry (“Roar” and “Dark Horse”).
All of those tracks are rather distinct but pretty upbeat. Yet they sound nothing like Lorde.
Of course, popular music shifts all the time, so it’s certainly possible — perhaps even likely — that something would have broken through to usher in a new era. Even in 2013, the signs of change were percolating.
Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die generated significant yet divided buzz when it dropped in January 2012, and several of its unique stylings can be found in Pure Heroine. And the No. 1 single of that year was Gotye and Kimbra’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which has little parallel in terms of modern hits.
In theory, anyone could have capitalized on the then-undefined shifting music landscape. Maybe Lorde was just in the right place at the right time.
“Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?”
Those curious nine words set us on the 37-minute journey that is Pure Heroine.
Lorde follows with observations of the minutiae of everyday life and how she revels in it. But “Tennis Court” takes a turn in the second verse, with Lorde saying she’s about to get on a plane for the first time, offering a brief glimpse in the way her life is shifting given her newfound fame post-“Royals.”
That tug of war between stasis and change, between mundanity and glam unfolds as a central theme throughout the album’s 10 tracks. It’s a critique of pop excess, particularly as a response to the party culture and club boom of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Pure Heroine hammers this home, and while it’s not always subtle, it’s always clearheaded. The record that has a point to make, and it very much stays in its lane making that point.
Yet, it doesn’t feel stale by the end.
The opening run of tracks following “Tennis Court” — including “400 Lux” and “Royals — fall into similar thematic territory about preferring a basic middle-class life free of material concerns, as does “White Teeth Teens” near the end of the album. But it’s the details and subtle melodic changes that keep a fresh perspective.
“Still Sane” and “A World Alone” each add complexity into Lorde’s worldview, as she worries about losing her comforts and status as her fame grows. “Only bad people live to see their likeness set in stone / What does that make me” she explicitly questions in the former.
“Glory and Gore” veers into full-on black satire, comparing celebrity culture to gladiatorial combat. While it’s the one song from the album I’ve never loved — some of the writing gets a bit too muddled, and there’s a few bizarre production quirks like the thonking noise in the bridge — I still appreciate its bold sentiment.
The back-to-back duo of “Ribs,” the album’s most ethereal and nostalgic track, and “Buzzcut Season” portray Lorde’s worries about aging and what she’ll leave behind as she grows up. It’s a quarter-life crisis in music form that’s hauntingly relatable, and it’s not surprising that the former has particularly become a fan favorite.
And then there’s “Team,” the record’s other major hit. It neatly wraps all of Pure Heorine’s anti-pop themes into one song, skewering materialism and pop culture while being comfortable with one’s current station in life.
Lorde’s writing throughout the album is incredibly astute. Sure, it can sometimes feel like that of a self-righteous and naïve teen who thinks she has the world all figured out. But it’s never a drag.
It’s authentic to herself, a relatable coming-of-age tale as told by a 15- and 16-year-old in late 2012 and early 2013 unfurling her life. She captured Zillenial ennui with razor-sharp precision, warts and all.
No wonder so many have tried to follow suit.
“Maybe the Internet raised us”
It’s a sign of your influence when record labels begin a rush to find and promote artists just like you.
In the wake of Pure Heroine, a new crop of alternative-leaning pop musicians with whispery vocals appeared: Halsey, Alessia Cara and Julia Michaels, to name a few.
“When I was signed it was just after Lorde too, so labels were wanking over trying to get loads of girls who were like her,” an unnamed musician told The Guardian in 2017.
But few parlayed that into any real long-term success.
Some of that was because people recognized the copycats, and they didn’t distinguish themselves in any way besides being a Lorde clone. Some of that was because the general pop trends moved so much in Pure Heroine’s direction that it began to feel stale.
These artists could sound like Lorde, but they didn’t have the wise-beyond-her-years writing and insights to back it up.
Like many influential releases, Pure Heroine’s sound and themes don’t feel quite as towering the further we move from its release, and Lorde veered from the minimalist sound she helped popularize on 2017’s Melodrama (as an aside, my favorite pop album of the 2010s).
But Pure Heroine’s distinctive characteristics still remain, and it’s hard to argue few do it as well as the original.
This all puts us in an interesting place 10 years later.
While the dominant sound inspired by Pure Heroine has loosened its grip on pop music in the 2020s, its roots and success are still heard in artists like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. They, too, blend styles and take influences from less-mainstream sources while crafting relatable lyrics for an audience roughly the same age as Lorde was in 2013.
But pop music has become so diversified and difficult to predict that it’s impossible to know whether they will have a long-lasting impact like Lorde. Will When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? or Sour inspire thinkpieces and retrospectives like this in 2029 and 2031, respectively?
Hard to say.
Nothing in the 2020s so far has felt like it will leave the same impact as Pure Heroine, or at least nothing is as immediate as that album. Maybe that’ll change.
But instead of foolishly trying to predict the future, let’s recognize a paragon of pop’s past and present. There was nothing quite like Pure Heroine in 2013, and in 2023, I’m not sure anything still comes close.
As Lorde wrote in the album’s liner notes: “It’s the most powerful thing I can give.”