Best Lorde Songs: Ranked

Lorde did a great job curating the Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt. 1 soundtrack, though the album’s opening track, “Meltdown,” might’ve tried to do a little too much. The song repurposes Stromae’s standout instrumental “Merci” from Racine Carrée and layers on rap verses from Pusha T and Q-Tip, vocals from Lorde plus an outro from Haim? Lorde’s chorus is probably the only salvageable part of the song, aside from the bones of Stromae’s original song. —Tomas Mier

Lorde’s version of the Tears for Fears pop smash “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is so  and brooding, it’s practically unrecognizable. The song, with its beat tempered down and the production brought to a slow, simmering boil, appeared on the soundtrack to for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, fitting in perfectly with the film’s dystopian themes and preparing her for later work on the franchise’s music. —Julyssa Lopez

“Million Dollar Bills” is an unexpected slice of electro-pop, blipping and bleeping into random, upbeat directions as Lorde trills about high luxury and money dreams. It’s a different side of her — she even quipped that she’s the “of artist that writes something and thinks it’s cool for like 48 hours and then hates it” later when discussing the song — but it’s still undeniably catchy and feels almost like a precursor to her hit “Royals.” —J.L.

Lorde had stayed pretty quiet while working on Virgin, but she did come back with a heartfelt project when she joined Marlon Williams for “‘Kāhore He Manu E.” The song wasn’t just significant because it marked two major New Zealand stars teaming up; it was also Williams’ first Māori-language album. —J.L.

Lorde’s desire to walk away from stardom is all over Solar Power, but it hits with vivid specificity on this 93-second acoustic gem. Visualizing herself as a refugee from an unspecified future apocalypse, she sings about catching the last flight out of town with a suitcase full of magazines (thanks!) and offers a plea that’s all too relatable to listeners in the chaotic 2020s: “Won’t somebody, anybody, be the leader of a new regime?” —Simon Vozick-Levinson

This Pure Heroine deep cut is unusual, having initially appeared as the final track on her debut EP The Love Club. Her performance is hypotonic as she drawls, “It feels better biting down.” Every few verses, she pierces the statement with even sharper refrains. “Breathed so deep I thought I’d drown,” Lorde describes in one, while another offers, “The electronics of your heart/See how fast they fall apart.” It’s both a challenge and a case study with an edge of lethargy. —Larisha Paul

Lorde has never shied away from a good cover, and when she got tapped to participate on the Talking Heads’ Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, she came through with her rendition of “Take Me To The River,” the classic originally recorded by Al Green in 1974 and then revamped by Brian Eno for the Talking Heads’ second LP More Songs About Buildings and Food. Lorde’s take softens the song without losing its bumping catchiness. —J.L.

“I thought I was a genius, but now I’m 22,” Lorde sings with the kind of insight only a truly great lyricist can bring to their own back pages. “Man With the Axe” is one of her most emotionally bare songs, a rush of mixed feelings about songwriting and stage fright and someone she loves even when it feels like they’re cutting her in half. “It’s funny because it’s kind of melancholy, but I also think of it as very cozy,” she said in an Apple Music track-by-track. “To me, it sounds very private — I sort of don’t even like thinking about people listening to it, because it’s just for me.” —S.V.L.

“Helen of Troy” was added as a bonus track to Solar Power months after the album dropped, but it was actually one of the first songs Lorde made with Jack Antonoff to help shape the project’s themes. “I don’t wanna get lost, I wanna worship the sun, ah / If you want, you can come,” she sings. The track sees her reflecting on her success and seemingly nodding to being shut out of a solo performance at the 2018 Grammys. The chorus echoes the optimistic energy Lorde emulates across the album. —T.M.

Lorde recreated one of  Paul Westerberg most tenderly written classics for the extended cut of Pure Heroine, and for a generation of fans, it’s been a surprise to hear that it’s actually a Replacements cover. Part of that is because Lorde is so at ease singing about the sobering moments after wild nights and never-ending parties, the material fitting in perfectly with a lot of the ideas she grapples with in her music and allowing her to make it her own. —J.L.

Lorde has her own cheat codes for getting through on “Easy (Switch Screens),” her collaboration with Son Lux. The record reimagines the original recording of “Easy,” which she first covered in 2014. But when she finally got a real chance to contort the song in 2020, she did more than just pull her heart out to make it easy being alone. “You switch the screens over the rest of your flows/They poke around until they get what they want,” she sings over distorted production. In the final verse, Son Lux switches the lyric from “being alone” to “feeling alone,” a true mark that Lorde was here. —L.P.

Like so much of Solar Power, “Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen It All)” is a deceptively sunny, lightly rendered track with an emotionally underbelly. Through gentle, trilling vocals, Lorde sing-songs about growing up and coming to terms with who she is, bringing some comfort to her younger self. Produced by Jack Antonoff, Lorde has describe the song as “Eurythmics meets Robyn.” —J.L.

When The Hunger Games: Mockingjay director Francis Lawrence sat down to talk with Lorde, he says he was immediately struck by how she “innately understood” the film. He wanted her to translate her feelings into the soundtrack, which she wrote music for and also curated, and one standout became the Bright Eyes cover “Ladder Song.” It’s another unexpected Lorde rendition of a beloved song, but already, the track boasts a tender quality that Lorde reinterprets with an extra bit of longing. —J.L.

Lode delivers devastating burn with effortless ease on “Dominoes,” a casual takedown of a hot empty rich guy who wafts through his entitled existence without consequences or reflection — “Go all New Age, outrunning your blues,” she sings, before hinting the darkness the song’s target has left in his wake: “I know/Know a girl who knows a/Another girl who knows the woman that you hurt.” In just over two minutes, she shreds an entire genre of spoiled jerk. —Jon Dolan

On this Solar Power bonus track, Lorde is supposedly “acting her age, not her horoscope” and defying the Scorpio instinct to, well, hold a grudge. But that doesn’t stop her from delivering self-described scorching lines like, “There’s a new girl on your song /I didn’t know that I could be replaced” over groovy guitar licks. By the end of the vacillating song, Lorde remembers to channel her new, enlightened self and wish her former friends well. —Maya Georgi

With this sweet ode to her dog Pearl, Lorde managed to zero in on the particular tenderness and warmth with which you revisit the memory of someone you really loved. Though the tone is a little melancholic, there’s a joy to the song, which Lorde wrote when Pearl was still alive and sitting under her piano. “I looked down and was like: ‘You big dummy. You’re never going to know that I’m writing this song about how much I love you.” —J.L.

Something about the way Lorde sings “tequila” in “California,” over the soft plucks of a Fender Jaguar, scratches an itch in the brain that can only come from a pop star’s ode to the Golden State. But Lorde’s version is more nuanced than most. The singer waxes poetic about California’s good weather and even better vintage-clothes stores before she chooses to trade-in Hollywood pressures and splendor for a breezier, dreamier New Zealand — all while melodically referencing The Mamas & the Papas. —M.G.

Written with singer Tove Lo, this Melodrama single ended up setting the sonic tone for much of Lorde’s formative second album. With its easy chorus and straightforward lightness, the catchy song, Lorde has said, was a free-flowing ode to the “moment in every evening where everyone’s at a good level and maybe the sharp edges…haven’t quite shown themselves yet.” —J.A.B.

What made Pure Heroine so special was how effortlessly Lorde captured the coming-of-age experience. “White Teeth Teens” is a take on the pressures of cliques and wanting to impress the people around you. It circles back to the same characters from “The Love Club,” siding with the outsiders instead of the popular kids. Sonically, it carries the same nostalgic energy that defines Pure Heroine as a whole. “Their molars blinking like the lights / In the underpass where we all sit / And do nothing, and love it,” Lorde sings. —T.M.

“Oceanic Feeling” closes out the standard edition of Solar Power with a soft reflection. One of the few songs Lorde wrote entirely on her own on the album, it opens with the sound of water and unfolds into a reflection on her New Zealand roots, her family, and her future. She wonders dreamingly: “If I have a daughter / Will she have my waist / Or my widow’s peak? / My dreamer’s disposition or my wicked streak?” —T.M.

The last single Lorde released in the run up to Virgin is all about feverish anticipation. The Jim-E Stack produced track swirls on the edge of dancefloor ecstasy, driven by cloud-punching keyboard stabs that bring to mind the serotonin rush of an old-school rave anthem. The music builds and builds but the liftoff we think we’re waiting for hangs in midair, a perfect fit for a song where Lorde proudly sings, “I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers.” —J.D.

This highlight from Melodrama recalls “Royals” musically, but its hard-partying swagger is subverted by a sense of ambivalence as Lorde looks to the inevitable moment when being “the King and Queen of the weekend” might not be enough to sustain her. “Can we keep up with the ruse?” she asks as the song’s sleek, subterranean track pushes her to the next rush, which also might be the last one. —J.D.

Lorde gets candid about her newfound fame on “Still Sane,” which, surprisingly, is the least streamed track on Pure Heroine on Spotify. “I still like hotels, but I think that’ll change / Still like hotels and my newfound fame / Hey, promise I can stay good,” she sings. It’s a poignant snapshot of a teenage Lorde grappling with what it means to live in the spotlight, already aware that being “all work and no play” might be the only way to survive in the industry, though it might “make me lose it.” —T.M.

Lorde knows a thing or two about being crowned the voice of a revolution as a teenage girl. It’s no surprise then, that she slipped so seamlessly into the perspective of Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen here: Over haunting hums and screeching strings, Lorde delivers an industrial, almost vengeful, performance. Lorde’s refusal to play the game is what always made her the perfect figurehead, not for the condescending adults who were fascinated by her angst — but the young people who felt that pressure, too. “I got my fingers laced together and I made a little prison/And I’m locking up everyone who ever laid a finger on me,” she sings. “I’m done with it.” —L.P. 

If “400 Lux” is a delicate love letter to suburbia, “Team” is the celebratory ode to Lorde’s hometown and all the cities across the world that will never be seen on TV. With swooping synths and a thumping bass, the track is one of Lorde’s most propulsive pop hits — and one of her most successful ones; “Team” marks the singer’s second-highest charting single on the Billboard 100. —M.G.

A jeremiad that feels like a lullaby, ‘Fallen Fruit” delivers an impassioned plea for environmental sanity against spare, pretty strumming. Joined by Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers on vocals, Lorde weaves Biblical and psychedelic imagery as she laments her generation’s inheritance of an increasingly ruined world,  updating the tradition of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” for her own moment. —J.D.

Perhaps one of the most underrated tracks in Lorde’s discography, “Liability (Reprise)” finds the singer in the morning after a night of dancing with “all the heartache and treason” on Melodrama. There’s no chorus, no booming pop perfection, just pure self-reflection and  atmospheric synths that hover around Lorde as she comforts the earlier “Liability” version of herself and promises, “You’re not who you thought you were.” The effect is so chilling, even engineer Laura Sisk had an identity crisis after editing the song. —M.G.

“Come on and let the bliss begin,” Lorde implores on the radiant title track from her third album. The music is fittingly beautiful and confident, building an ebullient track out of early-Nineties dance-rock, California orchestral pop, and the kind of introspective indie-folk associated with the song’s backup singers, Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers. “Can you reach me?,” she asks. “No, you can’t,” as if luxuriating in a sunshine state all her own. —J.D.

Disclosure and Lorde had a long-standing history, having teamed up a few times for different mash-ups and remixes of “Royals” and “White Noise.” It might be why their collaboration here feels so seamless: Lorde brings tons of emotion and power to her vocals, as Disclosure keeps things moving with their signature catchiness. —J.L.

A late single off Pure Heroine, “Glory and Gore” finds Lorde imagining high school drama and social dynamics as a gladiator battlefield. She gets briefly personal in a soliloquy-style bridge, reciting: “Secretly you love this, do you even wanna go free? / Let me in the ring, I’ll show you what that big word means.” Its Hunger Games-esque lyrics landed it on a trailer for the History Channel’s Vikings in 2014. —T.M.

The breezy Solar Power track got its luminosity from off air-light vocals and the most careful guitar strums, letting Lorde tease out a satirical look at the limits of wellness culture. She coos about how darkness can take over, even when people are buying into the false promises of holistic health: “Ladies, begin your sun salutations/Transcendental in your meditations (love and light)/You can burn sage, and I’ll cleanse the crystals/We can get high, but only if the wind blows.” —J.L.

The teenager singer composed one of her first hits by spinning a metaphor and meditation about aging and the future out of her neighborhood athletic facilities. The song was her “way of holding onto something personal,” she said in a 2013 interview, as she “start[s] to travel and leave this little suburb world behind.” The result was one of Lorde’s first signature songs, one that pointed to her distinct writing style and knack for articulating deep emotions in three minute pop songs. “Call it teen boredom,” as Lorde put it herself. —J.A.B.

From her first heart-aching ballad with Melodrama’s “Liability” Lorde has developed a pattern of releasing slow-tempo, intimate tracks as her second single for each new project. On Solar Power, it was the weed-infused wisdom of “Stoned at the Nail Salon.” For Virgin, Lorde took the crescendoing energy of Rihanna’s “Love on the Brain” and turned it inside out in the R&B inflected track “Man of the Year.” As the singer reveals more and more about her identity, the production builds until it crashes into a climactic crush of drums. It’s soft, arresting, and raw in the best way. —M.G.

“Sober II (Melodrama)” marks the moment of the party where the favors have started to dissipate and the sun has started to come up. “Lights are on and they’ve gone home but who am I?” Lorde asks over dissonant, cinematic piano chords. The singer cushions the scary question away in a short, yet winding track that could have easily been an interlude on Melodrama. Instead, with its closing incantation (“we told you this was melodrama),” the song is perhaps the most melodramatic one on the whole project. —M.G.

On “Tennis Court,” Lorde asked, “Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?” The unraveling that occurs across the tracks that follow on Pure Heroine offer better topics of conversation than whatever those people have in mind. What if we spiraled about the passage of time, and how we can’t get our youth back once it’s gone, instead? When we reach the end, on “A World Alone,” Lorde is content with the one person who truly gets it. Even if only for the moment. “I know we’re not everlasting, we’re a train wreck waiting to happen,” she admits. “People are talking/Let ’em talk.” —L.P.

On Solar Power, Lorde stepped into the sun and renounced her crown as alt pop’s leading woman. Fittingly, “The Path” opens the album with a gliding shimmery acoustic guitar and organic instrumentals as the singer refuses to answer phone calls and remembers the worst moments of her teen fame. The track cracks open on the chorus with sunny rhythms as Lorde declares, “The savior is not me.” It’s a chill tune that acts as both a mantra for the newfound Lorde and a salve for her fans. —M.G.

When it comes to a breakthrough, you can’t get more special than Lorde’s “Royals.” Co-written with Joel Little, the minimalist electro-pop cut was an auspicious critique of flaunting materialistic lifestyles by the ingenue. The song’s rise was so specific to that early streaming culture era: Lorde first self-released the song on SoundCloud in 2012 as part of her debut EP The Love Club. After the buzz became too big to ignore, her label re-released it and soon. a megahit was born: The song topped the Hot 100 for nine weeks and was remixed by the Weeknd and Rick Ross, among others. Lorde went from normal New Zealand teen to the type of pop star beloved to both kids her age as well as industry vets like David Bowie and Dave Grohl. —B.S.

The perfect cap-off to a perfect album: four minutes of end-of-the-night sing-alongs, about being lonely and afraid, about being “young and ashamed,” about craving companionship.Written in the wake of the deaths of Prince and Bowie (“all of our heroes fading”), but the scene-setting in the first verse came blowing the sound system at a party she co-DJ’ed: “So yeah,” Lorde said. “Kind of about me. I’m a mess. — J.A.B.

On the less-popular, equally regal twin sister of “Royals,” Lorde claws her way out of a high school clique with trip hop swagger. “I’m sitting pretty on the throne, there’s nothing more I want except to be alone,” she sings with the perfect mix of teen apathy and charm. It’s a track that fits well into Lorde’s collection of outcast anthems. —M.G.

Light and lilting, this deep cut was featured on the deluxe edition of Pure Heroine. Its tone is sweeter than the sticky darkness of the debut, with its hazy bass and trip hop elements. Like the rest of the album, Lorde’s strength is in her details: legs sticking to seats, a hot-headed friend, the changing of seasons, smelly breath, chewing gum, an allergic reaction. She’s using them all to relay those intoxicating feelings of having a crush in the way only Lorde can do. —B.S.

One of the glowing highlights from Lorde’s impressive debut, “400 Lux” is the most tender slow burn. While a horn drones on against a simple beat, Lorde writes about falling in love in the middle of suburban teen malaise with the kind of specificity that has become a trademark of her work. As she sets the scene of car rides breezing past trees and draped wrists over a steering wheel, she sums up all her emotion. —M.G.

When Charli dropped the Brat track about the messy competitiveness of female friendship, fans quickly surmised that she was singing about Lorde. The pair had been fans of each other and often compared to one another in their early years. Shortly after dropping Brat, the pair worked it out on the remix with a new verse from Lorde, who reflects on what it was like to hear Charli’s song and point out that her distance was a product of her own struggles with her body and sense of self. The song was more than just a big name collaboration between two pop auteurs: it was an honest conversation between old friends that they bravely shared with the rest of the world. —B.S.

On this sparse piano ballad, Lorde channels her inner Stevie Nicks as she haunts her lover while realizing she needs to move on. Her voice traverses its full range, from chilling falsettos to a pulsating bass, as she realizes that while she’ll always love her ex she will be happier and more centered without him. It’s “Silver Springs” by way of Kate Bush, icy then warm and overall transcendent. —B.S.

In the same vein as “Green Light,” Lorde reintroduces herself in the wake of heartbreak. “What Was That” has a sharper edge to it, a little more sliced open than she’s ever been before. She plants herself firmly in her new home, New York City, setting the scene for her musical birth everywhere from her home to Baby’s All Right. In the sadness is the type of euphoria she probably felt taking “MDMA in the backyard” as she sings on the chorus. —B.S.

With the first half of “Hard Feelings/Loveless,” Lorde offers one of the best meditations on heartbreak of all time. The singer recalls all the aching details of her first love into a poem trickling with so many profoundly personal glimpses, each one cuts deeper than the last until Lorde delivers the suckerpunch to the gut: “When you’ve outgrown a lover, the whole world knows but you.” Meanwhile, the second half of the song is a bombastic juxtaposition that finds Lorde leaning into the callous tendencies of modern love affairs. It’s the best kind of melodramatic whiplash. —M.G.

On this sweet and understated Solar Power cut, Lorde proves that it still feels so scary getting old. She ruminates on her choices so far, wondering if she’s made the wrong ones and if there’s still time to change. She’s ready to slow things down, and does so beautifully with the simply, folky arrangement that soundtracks a delicate, intimate vocal performances from her. She’s still wise beyond her years, ultimately wondering if these big, poetic thoughts are real or just a product of being, as the title indicates, stoned at the nail salon. —B.S.

No song encapsulated the daring sonic rush of Melodrama like this journey through new love so great it deserved to be hung up in the storied Paris museum. Lorde wrote the song to encapsulate “the big sun-soaked dumbness of falling in love,” she said in an interview. “It’s like your whole head is like glue, it’s amazing.” —J.A.B.

Lorde started her first EP with “Bravado,” a dark, stewing cut that captures everything she’s good: aching vocals, moody production, slow, dramatic build-ups. The lyrics feel almost sharply juxtaposed to the musical brilliance in the song as Lorde sings about finding confidence as an artist: “I want the applause, the approval, the things that make me go ‘oh,’” she declares. Luckily, with an arsenal of tracks as good as “Bravado,” she earned all that and more. —J.L.

he four year wait between Lorde’s debut and her sophomore album were more arduous than any other four year wait between albums for the singer. But she delivered something masterful with “Green Light,” the lead single off Melodrama. The bold dance-pop cut was a mature, exhilarating and maximalist return from singer. After scenes from her youth in New Zealand, Lorde was now revealing the intimate realities of dealing with heartbreak while at the top. She teamed with Jack Antonoff this time, still early in his pop production career. The result is bold and cathartic, a breakup post-mortem that celebrates the pain as equally as the release when you finally move on. —B.S.

Lorde’s memories retain an excess of detail when they find themselves being reformatted into these brief sonic capsules. “Buzzcut Season” is one of her most viscerally vivid. She describes flames leaving kisses on a scorched scalp, frayed hair prime to be buzzed away. The record is vivid, too, in its account of how music and technology offered a great escape for a generation watching its future disintegrate, slowly at first, and then with a quickening speed. ”Explosions on TV/And all the girls with heads inside a dream/So now we live beside the pool/Where everything is good,” she sings, a childlike curiosity in her voice. “The men up on the news/They try to tell us all that we will lose/But it’s so easy in this blue/Where everything is good.” —L.P.