Lorde

A school talent show video reached a Universal Music A&R exec in 2009, landing her a label deal at 12. A few years of sessions with producer Joel Little led to "Royals," dropped on SoundCloud in 2012. It spent nine weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making her the youngest solo artist to write and perform a chart-topper. Writing about wealth from the outside during peak hip-hop bling culture was the whole play. The anti-flex angle worked because it came from a teenager who actually meant it.

Melodrama landed in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums and earned a Grammy Album of the Year nomination, setting a bar that Solar Power couldn't clear. The 2021 indie folk detour was a real stumble, and she later said the response had been "confounding and painful." Virgin in 2025 was the correction: #1 in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, #2 in the US, and performed in full at Glastonbury unannounced on release day. That's the kind of confidence you don't fake.

Her mother, Sonja Yelich, is a published New Zealand poet, which explains something about where the writing instinct comes from. She has chromesthesia, a condition that maps sounds to colors, and she has said she used it deliberately while making Melodrama, assigning a color to each song's emotional register. After finishing that album she went to Antarctica to research climate change and published a short book, Going South, about the trip. None of this is what most pop stars do in their downtime.