In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole. That’s the message you get from the defiantly low-concept video for her single “Tennis Court,” in which the 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter (real name: Ella Yelich-O’Connor) stares right at you—her taunting, onyx pupils burning a hole through the computer screen—for a hypnotic and somewhat uncomfortable three and a half minutes. (I’'s an anti-video in the tradition of the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young,” and, fittingly, her moody cover of “Swingin Party” has been making the rounds.) In a moment when too many new artists seem afraid to offend or go off script, Lorde is an exciting contradiction: an aspiring pop star who’s had a major-label development deal since age 12 (she was discovered at a local talent show) but has retained a seemingly genuine iconoclastic streak. The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift; Katy Perry asked her to tour with her and—politely but firmly—she said no. With the global smash “Royals” (the first song in 17 years by a female solo artist to top Billboard’s alternative chart) she made her name by sneering at everything else on the radio (“We don’t care/We aren’t caught up in your love affair”). The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks. Twenty seconds into her debut album, Pure Heroine, she’s already announced that she’s bored. Twice.
Lorde’s voice occasionally takes the form of a wide-eyed, Feist-y coo, but much more often it’s a low, clenched growl; like everything else about her, it has an air of “wise beyond her years.” “I didn’t start writing songs until I was 13,” she said in a recent interview, almost apologetically, but then quickly accounted for the lost time, “Before that, I wrote short fiction.” Now that she’s a wizened 16, Lorde, who wrote all the lyrics on Pure Heroine and co-wrote the music, has fashioned herself a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Her songs capture the drama and debauched regality of being a teenager: Their subjects include online gossip, empty bottles, queen bees, and young people who already feel old. “I’m kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care,” she sings with a languid sigh on the bleacher-stomping single “Team.” Or is she saying “revelled”? It’s hard to tell the two words apart, and maybe that’s the point.