, before she won both Song of the Year and Best Solo Pop performance for “Royals,” Lorde, then a teenager, performed the track like she was possessed. Her hands flinched around the mic. She whispered the chorus through thick purple lipstick, stopping every few minutes to smile at herself.
That’s what snaps into focus about Lorde, 10 years later: the sense that she’s letting you into a private joke. Lorde’s rise represented the first time a Gen-Z pop star wedged her way into the mainstream, and she offered intimacy to an audience skilled in detecting bullshit. Her young fans knew the gap between curation and reality, authenticity and artifice — but Lorde was raw and writhing, and spoke in specifics.
“This kind of weird girl that’s wearing all black, that’s kind of awkward — she had this persona people gravitated to,” said Maleek Munroe, a journalism major at Mercy College in New York State. He was in sixth grade when “Royals” came out, a moment that he says “changed my entire life” — for the first time, he said, he heard music that represented what it was like to grow up with the constant glow of a phone, the particular aches of an adolescence he could see himself in.
lorde Summertime sadness ended this flop song
MTV
She is a last gen milennial! not gen z but congrats tho
I'll never, ever forget it 😌
lorde basically revived pop along with katy perry and beyonce that year
Wow, it's amazing to see how far Lorde has come in the last decade! Royals really was the song that put her on the map and paved the way for her success. Here's to many more years of great music from her!