REVIEW #1: 96/100

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Lorde has given us three albums in the span of a year – THREE. And you may think, such an output of creative work must come at the cost of quality, right? Right? Well, ‘Magic Hour’ cuts zero corners. It doesn’t compromise. It doesn’t settle, it takes risk and what we’re left with is one of the greatest complete albums CAL has ever seen.

 

From the beginning, we are slammed with ‘Solstice’ which instantly puts you behind the wheel of a car speeding down the coastline, with your friends in the back like you’re the stars of the most beloved coming of age blockbuster the world has yet to see. It feels like the song of the summer to end all songs of the summer. The instrumental is rich with layered sounds that feel equal parts 60’s surf rock and something completely fresh. And 'fresh' is such a great word to describe a lot of this album – it feels like nothing we’ve heard before, especially from Lorde.

 

The album features some incredible storytelling, with songs like ‘Charlie’ and the title track grabbing listeners by the heartstrings and taking them on a journey in to Lorde’s life. Thanks to this, ‘Magic Hour’ as an album feels like a poignant love letter to what it means to grow up.

 

The more emotional songs on the album are nothing short of heartbreaking. ‘Ordinary People’ stands out as such a beautiful moment on this record and it’s one of those songs you just know you’re going to put on when you need to ball your eyes out because it’s so vulnerable and breathtaking.

 

With those upbeat songs full of youthful enthusiasm woven in with the aforementioned tearjerkers, the album is a rollercoaster ride – one that at some points, I’ll admit I was a little thrown by. From track to track you never know if you’re about to grab a box of beers and get blackout in a field with your friends or grab a box of tissues and cry in a heap on the floor. It can be a little jarring and arguably could have benefited from some tracklist reshuffling but about two thirds in to the album I started to look at in a way that made the whole thing make a lot more sense to me…

 

Some songs sound as though they touch upon similar themes as other songs on the album. In some cases, they have similar instrumentals or tempos or Lorde sings with the same tone of voice. To some this may sound like the album is a touch repetitive or that there wasn’t enough to really distinguish some songs from others but it started to make sense to me... when I listened to the album as it were a collection of short stories. Hear me out here!

 

All throughout ‘Magic Hour’, Lorde is telling stories. She recalls specific memories and goes deep in painting pictures of where she was, who she was with and how it all felt at any given moment. This collection of stories unfolds, at least to me, in chapters. A song ends, you feel as though you’ve heard it all, then a few songs down the line you suddenly feel yourself back in that place, in those emotions, in those memories, with those people. And through this we see an even more layered, beautifully complicated story unravel from track one to track fourteen. On one track we see inhibitions tossed aside, risks taken, fucks not given, memories made and then… somewhere down the line we get the aftermath. The consequences, the fallout. It’s an incredibly well-thought-out and mature approach to the chaos that is growing up. We have fun, we don’t think about what might happen and we make mistakes. But it’s not all fun and we have to deal with what comes with living recklessly – people get hurt, relationships are tested, we have regrets.

 

Lorde tackles all of this on ‘Magic Hour’ in a way that cements it as a go-to album of and for this generation. It feels personal to Lorde’s life yet so relatable throughout, like watching a movie where you wish you were the main character. It’s clear a ton of thought and care went in to making this album and it stand outs as a shining jewel in Lorde’s pop queen crown.

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REVIEW #2: 93/100

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Just a month after the immensely successful & heavily praised surprise album "To Have Never Loved At All" by Lana Del Rey & Lorde, Lorde surprises with a brand new and her ninth studio album titled "Magic Hour" which was also released out of the blue despite it being officially announced just a few days prior. Recorded at the iconic Electric Lady Studios, the songstress experimented with genres such as: pop, indie pop, alternative, rock, americana, country and more. Like "To Have Never Loved At All", this album showcases Lorde's masterful skills in pure story-telling proving that she is still gold without all that glitters. Conceptually, the album explores love, friendship and a boundless advertence to the present in one monumental summer. It's not coincidental that the singer decided to release this record right as summer comes to a close. "Magic Hour", being exactly one hour and eight minutes long, is exactly like it was titled- a magical hour in the heat of one unforgettable summer. The kind of stories that bring all the emotions to the surface and remind you to be grateful for them. The third track on the record "South Bound" is the only song where you'll find any sort of regret or a wish to rewrite history. In a way, that highlights the solidarity of the tracks in embracing the experiences and memories of the past but not falling to an oversentimental and maudlin place of nostalgia.  The songs on "Magic Hour" are sonically very diverse, from the surf pop rock summer opener "Solstice" to the somber tear-inducing "Ordinary People" to the country-bop "Rafe" to the facetious glam-pop piano-led crime-scene track "Super Dark Times" to the synth-pop love song "July" to the transcending-bright-ballad title track. Jack Antonoff's production keeps the album unpredictable and yet remarkably consistent,  giving the songs a tight structure from which Lorde can deliver her songwriting in a compelling and an immersive way. That is probably one of the biggest assets of this album - its' ability to bring the listener to those exact memories, emotions and experiences, even more so than on her previous records. The striking songwriting has been an ongoing element in Lorde's career- specifically on "Scarlet" and "To Have Never Loved At All" but with this album, she manages to take it even one step further. "Magic Hour" has a strong sense of place and time and the stories instantly resonate. Lorde has always had a flair for details, the little moments other writers tend to ignore. A good example would be the second track "Charlie" where she brings us to the moments of her closeted friend having his first love and finishes it with a hopeful wish for the romance to be fulfilled - "One day soon you'll bring me home for dinner... I'll kiss you in the middle of the god damn street". On "Party Favor", she brings us to a party that goes terribly wrong and ends with a suppression of emotions. The song's secret message is about a sexual assault during a party and although it is not mentioned literally, you certainly do get the feeling like the energy in the room is turning darker every second. In the midst of all the partying and noise, there is a prevailing deadly silence in the room that just keeps on growing - "So we'll talk, fill the silence. Anything to make it less quiet". On "Ordinary People", she talks about a boy who took his own life and is written from the perspective of a close friend of his. The song is written as if the friend is singing the song to him and shares the bright future that he imagined for him. The song is probably the most heart-wrenching song on the record and perhaps in Lorde's entire discography - "Your brother's graduating soon. Man, he really misses you. We all do". On "Finn", she starts off by giving us the setting of two friends in the bathtub. An embodiment of pure friendship and being there for each other when everyone else walked out - "You were there picking me up when I fell. Walked with me through hell and led me out". And of course the closing track "Eustis Lake" being the realization that all these moments are captured forever in time even when everything else fades away. A sort of relief in knowing that whilst nothing is immortal, the experiences and memories will always exist. The 8 part harmony at the end of the song couldn't have ended the album on a better note and is definitely one of the most powerful moments on the record along with the beautiful title track's outro. One of the biggest surprises on the album has to be the eighth track "Super Dark Times" which is generally something you wouldn't expect from Lorde to put out. A fun campy piano-led tune about basically getting away with murder of your ex-lover instead of having to deal with the natural aftermath of a break-up. The song doesn't take itself seriously at all and yet is written in such an hilarious but brilliant way filled with so many pop punchlines which easily makes this one of the best tracks on the record - "One day I'll grow up and be super successful. I'll keep your body hidden under my bed. Stuffed in a suitcase that look unsuspecting. Your friends and family will keep searching for years. I suggest you start running". 

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"Magic Hour" is undoubtedly another timeless and treasurable record from Lorde. The singer-songwriter manages to continue surprising and avoid from sinking into a tired banality of doing what she is expected to do. On this album, she displays the full gamut of her skills and yet we should know by now that we haven't seen anything yet from Lorde.

Solstice- 8.5 
Charlie- 8.5
South Bound- 10
Party Favor- 10
Ordinary People- 10
Rafe- 10
July- 9
Super Dark Times- 10
The House At The End of The Street- 8.5
Finn- 8.5
Blink- 8.5
Midas- 9
Magic Hour- 10
Eustis Lake- 10

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REVIEW #3: 88/100

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Not content with one surprise release this year, Lorde has returned with yet another brand new album, Magic Hour. The album comes quite hot off the heels of her collaborative album with Lana Del Rey earlier this year but despite it’s close proximity to that release, it’s a bit of a different beast entirely. It’s consistent with Lorde’s output thus far to shake things up dramatically with every new release and Magic Hour stays true to that. It has some of the same DNA musically as To Have Never Loved at All, but it arrives in a form that feels less soft and delicate than that album. By the album’s conclusion, you’re left with quite a different feeling than that of the collab album and especially that of Scarlet. 

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In this later part of her career, Lorde has taken to latching onto motifs with her work in a way that she never had before. While her work consistently had a vision, it wasn’t until Scarlet that her albums began to revolve around central themes and concepts. Magic Hour isn’t an exception to this evolution, but of the three albums it is the loosest of the three. That is not to the album’s detriment however. In fact, the looser approach benefits this style much better than the absolute laser focus of the last two records. While Scarlet and To Have Never Loved at All cannot be faulted for nearly anything, they were albums that thundered down a very specific path and followed a throughline quite closely with little deviation. Magic Hour is an album of exploration and finds Lorde travelling down different avenues, winding through different paths off the main trail but eventually finding her way to the finish line in a logical manner. 

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To that end, the album feels more experimental even if it’s not being innovative. There’s not much new to the realm of alternative music in terms of sound that’s presented on the album, but there is much that’s new in the realm that Lorde has to this point existed in. It’s hard to imagine that a song like “Southbound” or “Eustis Lake” could come from the same woman who produced “Never Met a Man” or “Do I Look Lonely?”, but it’s this fact that makes this sound exciting even if it’s not something new. Lorde wears genres like clothes, never committing to one outfit for very long and this is another quick change done quite well. 

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The album’s experimentation rarely works against it but one area that does begin to force the album to swim upcurrent is it’s pacing. The album is on the longer side by almost any metric and while length isn’t necessarily equated with bloat, the album’s momentum takes on an ebb and a flow. Nothing here feels superfluous but it sometimes feels like a song wouldn’t be held back from a few edits. The opener “Solstice” for example is nearly six and a half minutes long and while it’s a perfectly enjoyable six and a half minutes, it could’ve survived being shorter and carried the same heft. It’s not always songs that stretch over five minutes that fall victim to this (the nearly eight minute title track flies by), sometimes it’s the just under five minute tracks that feel as if they go on longer than they actually do. These pacing issues don’t sink the album by any means, but they can make it difficult on follow up listens to digest the album all at once time. 

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Lyrically the album cannot be faulted. This is perhaps the best written album of Lorde’s career which is certainly saying something. She continues to dig down deep and explore parts of herself that few artists would be willing to. She continues to be bold and confessional, devastatingly personal and brutally honest both with herself and with her audience. There are times that it becomes difficult to hear, but you cannot (and should not) turn away. Lorde has a talent for making her albums feel like conversations, the two of us sat down on the couch in front of the fire music about life and how we ended up in this moment. It’s these lyrics that make even the longest of these songs feel vital and important. You hang on every word and every word never disappoints. 

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From a production standpoint, the album remains consistently solid but it does threaten in it’s middle and late portions (with the exception of the final two tracks) to begin to blur together a bit in terms of sound. It never quite reaches the point of sounding uniform, and never approaches monotony, but there’s far less variation in the approach than we were spoiled with on Scarlet and To Have Never Loved at All. Her experimentations, as noted, are personal experimentations, flirtations with something new to her. But these sounds are not new to the music world and while it doesn’t at all appear to have been her intention to be innovative, it becomes a bit strange to hear her not pushing forward onto unhallowed ground. It doesn’t hurt the album, but it does make it feel less earth shattering than the previous two records. 

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In the end, Magic Hour rounds out this not-quite trilogy of records Lorde’s given us. While there is no tangible connection between the three works, they exist as a sort of de facto trilogy purely by their modes of release. They are siblings, but very different children. Of the three, Magic Hour does end up being the weakest, though not by a wide margin. The focus of Scarlet and To Have Never Loved at All is traded in here for a sense of adventure. At times, that focus is missed but the spirit and willingness to stray off to different places gives this album a sense of wonder and curiosity that the previous two did not have. Magic Hour is more though than just a third, just a sort-of trilogy closer, and to speak on it solely in comparison to the two works adjacent to it are to it’s disservice. The album stands perfectly fine on it’s own and represents something for Lorde unique to both it and her. It’s a reflection of where she is now, of where she could be going, and the comfort she’s found in her willingness to be uncomfortable. Whether or not Magic Hour goes down as her best work yet will be wholly dependent upon the listener, but that’s the beauty of it. 

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It’s not an album that can be easily defined in black and white terms and that in and of itself justifies everything it turned out to be. 

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