Royals

I confused Lorde with a Finnish hard rock band when she first started getting attention. Hard Rock Hallelujah, which makes no sense, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Turns out she’s a 16-year-old from New Zealand who spells her name with an E, and when I finally heard Royals, it was obvious why everyone was talking about her.

No production tricks, no affectation, just her voice and the song. What Lana Del Rey’s been chasing for years, Lorde was already doing at sixteen. Her debut Pure Heroine drops in October, and from what I’ve heard, it’s going to be harder to ignore than the usual 16-year-old prodigy albums. She played Berlin in September, probably to get the word out before the album dropped. Billboard’s calling her the new queen of alternative, which is the kind of hype that usually means nothing, but in this case I think they might actually be onto something.

There’s something about her that makes you listen differently. Not because she’s young or talented—plenty of people are both. It’s because she sounds like she knows what she’s doing, like she’s not trying to prove anything. That’s rare in a debut, especially at that age.