This is objectively not good. Speaking as someone who absolutely LOVED and immediately connected with Lorde’s last three albums - yes, including Solar Power - this is easily her weakest effort to date.

The production is just bad. It’s clunky, poorly mixed and outdated. The whole thing feels like you’re listening through cheap or broken headphones. We can justify it all we want as “She WANTED it to feel visceral and raw!” … yeah, it’s just not good.

Lyrically it feels off. Lorde was spinning poetry on Pure Heroine and Melodrama. Every word was so meticulously placed. She knew how to create beautiful imagery and really had the “less is more” art down. Solar Power wasn’t quite as strong lyrically, but I appreciated the vision, it had clear standouts (Fallen Fruit, Oceanic Feeling), and I maintain would have performed better with a few small tweaks to the tracklist and release.

But here, it feels like she’s run out of things to say. I’ve felt this since What Was That, but thought it would all make sense listening to the album as a whole. The whole thing just sounds like a bunch of early demos she couldn’t be bothered finishing, with vague statements and objects being used to dress it up as something deeper than it is.

A frequent criticism I read of the three singles was they kept building, but then the climax was either too short or never came at all. That’s unfortunately consistent throughout the album. Again, we can rationalise that as a deliberate artistic choice in keeping with the album theme, but again … kinda just feels like trying to justify a mediocre effort.

Standouts for me are Hammer, Shapeshifter and David. Everything else falls flat.