Solar Power

It's menacing, calming, earthy and completely otherworldly. And an appropriately unnerving conclusion to a project that, for all its bruises and emotional scarring, find a way to be flawless. And which confirms Lorde as continuing to inhabit a space-time continuum entirely of her own devising.

Deeply cohesive, conceptual and considered. Controlled while still being unexpected. Comforting within confines, placing a new level of distance and boundaries between her personal life and her fans as she focusses on feelings over stories.

Does the drastic gear shift work? It does, although there’s no avoiding that it may divide a previous fan base that looked at her widow’s peak and imagined they saw a dagger. ... But small things like this are quibbles in the face of how well Lorde has pulled off one of the more difficult stunts in pop music: making a happy album that’s a good album.

The album’s pace never really recaptures the Primal Scream vibes of the single. But the album is not much poorer for this equanimity, with its former teen star, elevated to instant mega-fame in the 2010s, pondering past lives, present happiness and future uncertainty with some deft writing, a gauzy feel and the odd Beatles melody.

There are plenty of lovely melodies, but it noticeably declines to deal in the primary currency of latterday pop, the banger, in favour of understatement. Bucking another current pop trend, it’s an album clearly designed to be listened to in full, rather than a collection of tracks from which to select additions to a playlist. It’s an approach that, at its worst, yields songs that sound undernourished – Fallen Fruit and Dominoes – but elsewhere it delivers, albeit gently.

The elegance of Solar Power is in its warmth, how you can put it on and not pay much attention to its details, and still catch yourself hitting replay.

There's a subdued quality to Solar Power that feels a lot like caution, or just self-protection — a deliberate retreat from the raw, unfiltered verve of her earlier output into the safer remove of a wry bystander more at ease with cool observation than confessional bloodletting.

This might not be the album that everyone wanted from Lorde, but it’s a solid, dreamy effort that deserves exploration. There’s plenty here worthy of attention if you can focus for long enough.

Every song on “Solar Power” pulls from a similar and finely curated aesthetic — early 2000s “CW”-theme-song pop; sun-drenched ’70s folk; just a pinch of Kabbalah-era Madonna — and rarely draws outside those lines, let alone picks up differently hued crayons. ... “Solar Power” stops just short of offering a full, varied range of expressions.

For the most part, the record is a heady trip that prances around greatness but settles for pretty good.

“Mood Ring,” which is sonically a highlight and lyrically a miss, is one of the more obvious satires, tackling wellness culture through the lens of Sixties commune life. While a valiant attempt, what it misses is that one of the best parts of Lorde’s songwriting is her incredible earnestness. When that is let loose, like on the absolutely stellar “Oceanic Feeling” and Big Star-esque “Big Star,” she is an unstoppable pop force.

On the whole, the 12 songs here are quieter, more meditative, and more grown-up than Lorde’s past efforts. But while Solar Power doesn’t traffic in the booming emotional catharsis of Melodrama, it doesn’t succumb to navel-gazing solipsism either.

[A] curiously low-key album ... These are weird, spare, twisty-turny psych-folk tunes, many of them without the propulsive beats that used to drive Lorde’s music; most of the time, she’s simply layering her fluttering, slightly raspy vocals over Antonoff’s noodly electric guitar in a way that recalls Nico’s 1967 cult classic “Chelsea Girl,” of all things.

Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop.