[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ordes lyrics and interviews read like the gritty voice of her generation, she’s knocked Miley Cyrus from the top spot of the US charts and has a track on the forth coming Hunger Games soundtrack, all by the age of 16. With her striking wide set eyes and sea of wavy hair, the fiercely independant New Zealander isn’t short of an opinion and her ideals are refreshing in an industry currently awash with twerking popstrels, “I think a lot of pop music and how females are portrayed in pop music is not a super healthy thing and I try and stay away from it,” she said. Do a Google image search for Lorde, not an arse cheek or cleavage in sight. “Basically everything that I put out that has my name on it is controlled by me,” she told MTV News. “I have a very strong visual identity. I know how I want stuff to look. I’m almost too involved. I feel like people who work with me are like, ‘Oh, God! Leave me alone!'” Perhaps her Tumblr gives an insight into her creative inspiration, like snippets from Vice magazine with grainy 90’s press images, random quotes and faceless hair models. Lorde and her co-writer and producer Joel Little had been letting things ‘grow organically’ on advice of their record label until Grimes, one of Lorde’s musical influences, happened to set the ball rolling after Tweeting a link to Lorde’s Soundcloud page last year. Now she has hits in the US and New Zealand under her belt and will no doubt achieve the same in the UK with debut single Royals, see video below. Talking about her personal taste for partying with The Guardian, Lorde says she prefers something more low-key than the lavish pop-star “Cristal, Maybach, diamonds” lifestyle she criticises in ‘Royals’. “We go to quite, like, grotty parties with super-weird punks, our lives aren’t super-aspirational to the pop world or anything.” Sounds like the kind of girl we’d like to meet on a grotty dance floor, in the mean time we’ll make do with her forth coming album Pure Heroine, out Oct 28. Check out Lorde’s style highlights below.
