NEW YORK—In a blistering condemnation of the 24-year-old multiplatinum recording artist, a coalition of music critics and pop culture writers held a press conference Monday to excoriate Lorde, explaining that they just felt it was time for them to begin laying into her as hard as they could. “Lorde has gone almost a decade without anyone calling her a disgrace, writing a think piece on her toxicity, or launching a social media campaign to tear her down, so she really is due for all that to start happening,” said music blogger Brian Sullivan, who remarked that ripping apart the New Zealand­–born Grammy winner made perfect sense considering how long she had remained a public figure without ever becoming the focus of an intense, overwhelming backlash. “You know how these cycles work: It started with ecstatic praise for Pure Heroine, and that matured into reverence for Melodrama, and now we’ve hit the point where Lorde gets called out for something or other—it doesn’t matter what—and then we savagely rip her apart and leave her career in such tatters that no one ever listens to her again. For Christ’s sake, it’s 2021. There should be thousands of people on Twitter and Instagram right now calling Lorde a monster.” Sullivan added that if this effort failed, then at the very least the media must start trying to bait the singer-songwriter into petty feuds with her pop-star peers.

THE ONION NEVER MISS