Lorde (NZ)

About

Also known as: Ella Maria Lani Yelich‐O’Connor, Ella Yelich O’Connor, eeeeyyyoooooo, ロード

Few artists have redefined pop from the outside quite like Lorde. The New Zealand singer burst onto the scene with "Royals", a spare, bass driven track that spent nine weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and sold ten million copies worldwide. Her debut album Pure Heroine cemented her as a singular voice in pop, and she followed it up by curating the soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. Her second album Melodrama, made with producer Jack Antonoff, took things somewhere more raw and theatrical, debuting at number one in the US and landing on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Solar Power went in a looser, more psychedelic folk direction that divided fans and critics alike. Most recently she teamed up with Jim E Stack for Virgin, stepping back into electronic pop territory to considerably warmer reception. Across all of it, her instinct for introspective, literary songwriting stays constant.