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Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars: In 2013, Lorde’s ‘Royals’ Was the Sound of the Big Pop Bubble Bursting
This Greatest Pop Stars Sidebar looks at Lorde and how her stripped-down "Royals" changed the direction of pop music in the mid-2010s.
Over the early 2010s, as a class of rising and returning stars was minted on radio, iTunes and YouTube, pop’s arms race was accelerating to unsustainable levels of hype. If Lana Del Rey was the first figurehead in pop’s trajectory towards moodier, more hip-hop-inflected territory over the 2010s — scoring her own first two top 40 hits in 2013, after her splashy 2011 debut and subsequent backlash the next year — Lorde took it to another level. Her debut album Pure Heroine more than delivered, bringing her tales of teenage ennui to a mass audience, while only hinting at the potential she’d unlock with 2017’s sweeping Melodrama.
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