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I took two of the chords from that song, reversed them, and this is future me talking back to her sort of saying ‘It’s going to be OK.’” “I was so apprehensive about what was to come and about growing up and there was so much I didn’t know. “I was listening to ‘Ribs,’ which is a little weird of me, but I was, and just thinking about who I was at that time of life,” Lorde explains, in a track-by-track PR release. Growing up a little at a time then all at once The tradeoff now is being thrilled she’s in a better place while fearing that she’ll never make a better song there.Īnd so now, midway through Solar Power, we get a breezy little acoustic-guitar jam called “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All),” which aims for the gentle majesty of Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” but settles for mid-tier cardigan coffeehouse Taylor Swift and leans a bit too hard on generic (and algorithmic) Instagram uplift: And Lorde’s wistful teenage lamentations (“Mum and Dad let me stay home / It drives you crazy getting old”) that would sound ridiculous if she weren’t so deadly serious. The massed wail of breathy backing vocals that crests with my favorite high note of the past decade. Her electro-goth marvel of a debut album, Pure Heroine, delivers on that promise throughout-“We’re so happy / Even when we’re smiling out of fear” is still a killer line-but “Ribs” is the one.
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It is 2013, and Ella Yelich-O’Connor is 16 years old, and the malevolent hush of her shocking smash-hit debut single, “Royals”-“We’re bigger than we ever dreamed / And I’m in love with being queen”-has made her 21st-century pop’s most improbable and vital superstar yet. Take her at her word, even when it seems like she might be joking. (OK, this record isn’t the end of the world.) We’ll get through this together. She knows how that might sound-a little tuned out, a little pedantic-and yeah, sometimes it sounds like that. She just wants you to put your phone down and catch some rays. Most likely this uneasily blissful and banger-averse record isn’t what you want, but it’s clearly what Lorde thinks you need. But I figured I’d get that out of the way because I value your time, and so, quite earnestly, does she, though all the beachy and weedy and deep-spacey earnestness makes Solar Power somewhat of a sun-kissed bummer.
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Not to bum you out, here on release day for the serenely restless New Zealand pop star’s third full-length, Solar Power. Additionally, the lyrics are fragmented and childlike ("We can talk it so good", "This dream isn't feeling sweet") but also extremely smart ("We can make it so divine" and the outro where she repeats every sentence as if she's obsessed with it but also drunk and can't compose her thoughts).The best Lorde song is still “Ribs” the best Lorde album is still Melodrama. However, Ella's voice is quiet and composed but feels like it's getting more and more panicked as it goes by.
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The beat is fast, at 128 bpm it's the same as songs like "I gotta feeling" and "Party Rock Anthem", which makes it feel like it's going by fast (like her youth) and like it's a party song (which is a central theme of the lyrics). Other than the sentimental value, I think Ribs is also one of the smartest songs on PH. On the one hand, it reminded me of my old friends and it was nostalgic and on the other it reminded me that everything was always going to be ok. And then a year later I'd settled in, I had new friends, I'd gone to new parties and wandered through different streets and Ribs wasn't painful anymore, it was bittersweet. I ached for my friends, I ached for my hometown and my family, it hurt to grow up and be an adult and live in a huge city all by myself and meeting new people and not having any familiar faces. Then, I went to university and for the first year I went back to listening to PH obsessively and Ribs just felt like someone was twisting a knife inside of me. I hung onto Ribs as kind of a lullaby that reminded me of my friends and our nights out. At the time I was just starting to go to my first parties and developing my social life and the idea of moving away and having to do it all over again was daunting and scary. I'm only a few months younger than Lorde and when PH came out I was in high school and the prospect of going to university loomed over my head. In my case, it came at exactly the right time in my life.