Lorde has always expressed discomfort with the idea of being an avatar for anything. But her music invited that sort of projection. Her songs made teenage life sound like a communal experience; they felt like one-on-one conversations, a friend recounting the story of that wild night or that intense feeling. Before she was ever really famous, she was already singing about how she was “kind of over gettin’ told to throw my heads up in the air” (so there). Her sophomore album, Melodrama, was sidetracked by heartbreak; instead of dealing with the uneasiness she felt over her newfound celebrity, she descended into the more relatable territory of romantic revenge and used that as fuel to make an album that was vivid and galvanizing.