Lorde mania hits: leaks, sell-outs and onion rings

Lorde’s sophomore album Melodrama officially drops today around the world. But all eleven tracks were already on a number of streaming and torrent download sites yesterday.

Given the long wait, it was to be expected a great deal of excitement would be generated.

Lorde allowed the album to be heard by a select amount of fans at listening parties in New York and Auckland on Wednesday. The New York party was attended by the first 50 fans who responded to a single tweet, asking them to email her to score tickets. 

The avid social media user has not responded to the leaks, and Universal Music New Zealand will not comment. But Lorde – born Ella Yelich-O’Connor – was clearly thrilled to see how many people waited until the official release to listen.

seeing all these tweets while southern hemisphere people are listening is killing me dead i can’t believe it’s real

— Lorde (@lorde) June 15, 2017

Fans who heard the album at the parties described the record as "heartbreaking but beautiful”, “gorgeous” and "It will blow minds".

The general sentiment was that rather than being Pure Heroine II, Melodrama pushes the envelope, experimenting with rhythms and sounds.

Lorde reportedly began writing the second album just a few months after Pure Heroine was released in 2013. 

But the sessions mostly took place last year in New York, with one of her fave places to write being a 24-hour diner called The Flame. 

Sober was written on the kitchen table of collaborator Jack Antonoff (aka Bleachers) and his girlfriend Lena Dunham. 

Four tracks have been released as singles. The first, the eclectic Green Light, about her split in 2015 from James Lowe, was her first new music in over three years and showed she wanted fans to expect the unexpected.

The unpredictable run continued with piano ballad Liability, the anthemic ode to wild partying Perfect Places (“All the nights spent off our faces / Trying to find these perfect places”) and the minimalistic Sober. 

Not unexpectedly, Lorde-mania is at fever pitch in her home territory in New Zealand. 

Fans snapped up all pre-sale tickets in ten minutes to her six theatre shows in New Zealand.

She’s deliberately keeping the NZ shows intimate. Dates through November in Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland are to an average of 2000 per night, with tickets at a very reasonable $80.

Part of the hysteria in New Zealand also included the story this week that Lorde might have been secretly running an Instagram account which apparently reviewed and rated onion rings around the world. 

Called @onionringsworldwide, it just had a handful of posts and 24 followers, of which Lorde was one. 

When NZ media contacted her management about it, the account was abruptly deleted.