Lorde – Royals

Just in time for Wimbledon, she’s got a song called “Tennis Court.”

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Anthony Easton: No one is better at hip dismissal than a bored 16-year-old — so elegant and so solipsistic — that it just seeps with the blood of First World teenagers who know that they are better than you. The best thing is that she might be. Best chorus of the summer. 
[8]

Edward Okulicz: Just when you think you’ve had enough of not-at-all-unattractive ladies who sing as if both their heart and lips weigh a ton, along comes Lorde with a shot of whimsy and a track that’s actually light and breezy and fun. On a track like this where it’s all lightly throbbing bass and beat (and weakly ironic lyrics and strawmen), the melody needs to be instantly memorable and it is — the chorus is like a cold glass of water to the face on a hot day. It’s a sashaying clap-a-long, if you like that kind of thing, and deserves to repeat its home-country success a scale big enough to keep her in gold teeth for years.
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Patrick St. Michel: Oh, to be 16 and this bright-eyed again. That’s how old Lorde is, and “Royals” runs on the sort of optimism only a teen who just discovered the vast wilds of Bandcamp can imagine. On “Royals,” she raging against pop stars and envisioning an alternate kingdom where Lorde, err, lords over like-minded folks choosing to make art for art’s sake rather than money. These are sentiments that in a lot of other people’s hands would me obnoxious, but Lorde makes it work because she sounds committed to her ideas and packages it in catchy music. “Royals” is built from the DNA of “indie” acts of the last few years. It has the cheerleader thump of Sleigh Bells, and the vocal harmonizing reminds of Dirty Projectors or Grizzly Bear. So yeah, good song, though it’s also filled with ironies. Like how, due to its success, she’s almost certainly cashing in on it. Or how the groups whose sounds seemingly inspired this ended up finding “buzz” that lead them to me not that different than the pop stars Lorde stink eyes. Maybe she’ll stare all this down in the next single.
[7]

Iain Mew: A song about the empty seductiveness of consumption that proves seductive but empty itself. Maybe if every song really were “like gold teeth, Grey Goose,” “Royals” would have something more to offer.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: A clickety thing about high aspirations and low ambitions, too slight to ensnare the imagination but too promising to brush off. Knowing little about Lorde going in, I wouldn’t have pegged her for sixteen years but it’s all there if you listen closely enough. She sounds whipsmart and smug at the same time, just like you’d expect a teenage to sound.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Expected Lordi; got Lana Del Rey in an abandoned subway car posing ironically with Rick Ross LPs. (She’s not dreaming of Windsor Castle in St. John, is she? Things have connotations.) Any interest this holds vanishes when one realizes it’s simply a better-produced “Price Tag.”
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Brad Shoup: “Royals” reminds me of large chunks of JoJo’s “Baby It’s You”; both songs shit on bling-rap but do so as representatives of the target demographic. But “Royals” could, with a couple tweaks, actually be a celebration. JoJo just wanted her boy, but Lorde wants to be Beyoncé. Toss in some synths and she could’ve had a cloud-rap classic. Those snaps are beastly, her cadences are infectious, her chorus melody indelible, to the point that I’m currently checking the eBay listings for tigers on a gold leash. 
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Alex Ostroff: It turns out that “Price Tag” wasn’t completely insufferable due to bad politics and idiotic misreadings of hip hop; at least 50% of what made it the absolute worst was Jessie J. How do I know? Because “Royals” stumbles into many of the same pitfalls and the lyrics do make me want to tear my hair out, but the harmonies and the echoey thud of the drums and the “Paper Planes” finger-snaps and the vague touches of subtley blooming vworp and the gentle sweep with which Lorde sighs “royals” are almost enough to distract me. If she can work her way past this whole bullshit guilty-pleasure ideology, Lorde could be a force for good in pop. If not, I eagerly await the day that she pulls a Marina and graces us with an unnecessarily-ironic concept album whose concept is “music that I condescend to sing even though it’s more enjoyable and better than I care to admit.”
[6]

Alfred Soto: It creates a different kind of buzz alright: the Joni-esque vocal swoops, finger snaps, and Lorde’s all-around swagger. Finding musical correlatives for her teenage fantasies is prodigious. The trick with fantasies, though, is persuading the rest of us they’re worth sharing. Gimme more though.
[6]

Mallory O’Donnell: Great minimal beat, decently feisty lyrics, lovely sentiment, vocal straight from Satan’s asshole.  
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