What was that? Text analysis of Lorde's lyrics using data from Spotify and Genius APIs
Exploring the lyrical evolution of Lorde's music
Lorde summer is officially here, as Lorde dropped her latest album Virgin on the 27th of June. Listening to this new album, I couldn’t help but ponder how much her sound has evolved and changed over the years.
So, what better time to explore how Lorde’s lyrical themes and emotional tones have evolved across her discography? For the analysis, I utilized the data provided by Spotify API in order to identify all the released albums and respective tracks of Lorde, and Genius API to access the track lyrics. You can find a more in-depth tutorial on how to use those APIs with Python and combine the data here.
What about Lorde? 👑
Lorde is an artist who is very dear to me. I still remember hearing Royals for the first time in 2013 summer, right after finishing high school, and then diving headfirst into the entire Pure Heroine album, listening to it again and again. In particular, during the strange 2013 Tumblr times, Pure Heroine and Lorde became somewhat of a Tumblr sensation, propelling her popularity into new heights, but as time went by, she became not that mainstream. I also very much enjoyed her 2017 album, Melodrama — a hymn to heartbreak — but Solar Power, released in 2021, was not my cup of tea. Solar Power had a very different sound in comparison to her previous work, and honestly, it was not what I loved about her music anyways. So, you can imagine my excitement when she dropped What was that? earlier this year, with its sound sending us back to the synth 2013 Tumblr girl era.
But what are the themes in Lorde’s music? My impression is that all of her discography is about a troubled teen relationship, a teen breakup, a friendship where everything is very complicated, and generally being seventeen and COMPLEX AND TROUBLED. But let’s take a look!
Word Clouds ☁️
First of all, I created some word clouds with her lyrics. Initially, I made a word cloud for all Lorde songs ever.
With just one glance, we can clearly identify that the words ‘love’, ‘know’, ‘now’, and ‘us’ dominate.
Then I also checked the word clouds of each album. From the word clouds of specific albums, we can get further insights into the specific mood of the lyrics of each album.
In Pure Heroine, we can notice the words like ‘people’ and ‘call’ standing out. In several tracks of this album, Lorde notices how people act, judge, or conform in societal norms, in contrast to her own detachment. For instance:
“It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care.” in Tennis Court
“Explosions on TV and all the people watch the scene.” in Buzzcut Season
In addition, the word ‘call’ stands out in the world cloud, but also the words ‘talk’ and ‘send’, indicating a modern, also slightly detached way of communication. Again from Tennis Court, “Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?”
Melodrama takes an even darker and more poetic shift, being absolutely heartbreaking — I used to think about it as the ultimate break-up songs collection; my girl Lorde was literally on the floor here. In the word cloud, we immediately notice ‘love’, ‘us’ and ‘mind’. In particular, ‘love’ and ‘us’ give the entire album a very different tone from Pure Heroine — in Pure Heroine, there’s a distance between her and ‘people’, but in Melodrama, there’s ‘us’.
Some words that stand out in the Solar Power word cloud are ‘girl’, ‘time’, ‘take’, ‘secrets’, and ‘breath’. In general, there is a tone of simplicity, reconnection, and healing throughout the entire album, like healing oneself after a devastating breakup. 😉 Focusing inwards — neither on people nor us.
In the Virgin word cloud, the words like ‘let’, ‘see’, ‘now’, ‘back’ stand out, possibly expressing introspection, as well as a contrast between past and present. We can maybe also draw a connection between the ‘girl’ of Solar Power and the ‘grown woman’ that appears here.
Sentiment Analysis 🎭
Then I also carried out a sentiment analysis on the lyrics. Firstly, I checked the polarity—based sentiment analysis, detecting positive or negative emotions. The sentiment scores over time/ albums look like this:
Positive sentiment peaks in 2013 with Pure Heroine, when Lorde was literally a teenager (duh!), but then adult life hit her. Negative sentiment peaks in 2017, during the Melodrama breakup mess.
Then I also did a sentiment analysis using the NRC Emotion Lexicon, which contains 8 emotions — anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust. Here is a line plot of the evolution of each of those emotions over time:
With a glance, we clearly see that over time Lorde kind of calmed down 😛 at least up to the release of Virgin; scores for all emotions in Solar Power are much lower than Pure Heroine. It is also visible that in 2017, with Melodrama, our girl Lorde was going through a lot; sadness, disgust, and anger peaking, anticipation bottoming. Virgin is not a happy album either — not as sad as Melodrama, nowhere near the joy and excitement contained in Pure Heroine.
I also visualized the emotions of each album in a heat map:
More specifically:
Pure Heroine scores the highest in joy, trust, and anticipation, but also fear. The lyrics express the perspectives of a teenage girl who is innocent, eager, but also a bit fearful for the life in front of her.
Melodrama is her saddest, angriest, and most disgusted album overall — the girl went through a lot.
In Solar Power, it seems that we get the exact opposite of Melodrama, maybe even to an extreme. The lyrics indicate a chill, a bit zoned out, even detached approach to life. No sadness, no fear, no anger or disgust, but also not many positive feelings either.
In Virgin, it seems that we get a vibe similar to Pure Heroine — the default Lorde — but much more cooled down. It’s like a more mature and realistic Pure Heroine Lorde, that is still true to her teen self, but also has been through things and is toned down a bit. The trust score is the lowest in this album, maybe indicating her eventual maturing. For Virgin, I also took a look at the dominant emotion of each track.
Named Entity Recognition 🗽
Named Entity Recognition is a process aiming to locate named entities in text and classify them into categories, such as persons, locations, dates, or quantities. For Lorde’s entire discography, there are very few mentions of specific people or cities. Of course, we get several mentions of California in respective tracks, but apart from this, we don’t really get consistent references to cities or places, similarly to other artists (as for instance, Lana Del Rey). Instead, her lyrics are filled with temporal markers and quantified experiences — words like ‘tonight’, ‘today’, ‘one’, ‘year’, ‘the early 2000s’ or the more recent ‘since I was seventeen, I gave you everything’. In particular, Lorde’s lyrics across all of her discography frequently explore concepts revolving around time—moments, youth, nostalgia, and impermanence. There is a heavy nostalgia her music incorporates in general — the lyrics do not romanticize specific persons or locations, but rather specific points in time or one’s life, as for instance being seventeen or experiencing the early 2000s. The most common time or quantitative references in here lyrics are as follows:
On my mind🌟
Analyzing a music artist's discography with text analysis allows us to explore their lyrical patterns and themes following a more quantitative and objective approach. In particular, for Lorde, I think that it is really interesting to notice how her lyrics and themes have evolved over time, along with her personal journey. To me, it is very intriguing to see specific outlooks we get while listening to her music, as for instance rebellious, heartbreaking, troubled, or hopeful, being reconfirmed by the analysis. Overall, text analysis allows for the extraction of meaningful insights from unstructured text data and gains a better, more quantitative understanding.
✨Thank you for reading!✨
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https://thelastchord.substack.com/p/review-lordes-virgin