Not long after her massive success with the album Pure Heroine, Lorde went unusually silent. For four years her fans waited for some sort of song or sound. On her twentieth birthday, however, Lorde posted to her Facebook page: “I moved out of home and into the city and I made new friends and started to realize that no-one is just good or bad, that everyone is both. I started to discover in a profound, scary, blood-aching way who I was when I was alone, what I did when I did things only for myself. I was reckless and graceless and terrifying and tender. I threw sprawling parties and sat in restaurants until the early hours, learning what it’s like to be an adult, even talking like one sometimes, until I caught myself. All I wanted to do was dance. I whispered into ears and let my eyes blaze on high and for the first time I felt this intimate, empire-sized inner power.

And then I wrote a record about it, all of it.”

On June 16, that record was released - and it’s the album this summer needed. Amidst all the chaos and controversy, so many people are looking for that inner power. We really don’t want to keep fighting, we just need to dance and feel the exhilaration of love. That’s really what Melodrama is all about, just as Lorde said. Many of us, especially those like myself who can identify with that post-teenage haze, feel that longing for self-discovery. Lorde, quite beautifully, performs these intensely internal and powerful lyrics as she goes through this very process.

Melodrama portrays some very real emotions with its synth and haunting vocals. “Sober” has this moody mix of foreboding and thrilling as we try to anticipate our future, while the piano-led track “Liability” lets us feel the pain of loneliness from a broken relationship. Then, true to Lorde’s reputation, there are songs like “Homemade Dynamite” and “Perfect Places” that evoke just the strongest desire to get up and dance. My personal favorite may be “The Louvre” because of the way that Lorde sings about the excitement of a new love; the song feels just as electric and iconic, and captures the essence of the theme so well.

Now, of course, I would love to go into great detail, but I really can’t. Not due to any word limit, but because I’m afraid I can’t do justice to the lyrics. Maybe Melodrama won’t strike you the same way that it does for me, but I’d make sure that you don’t miss out on this new release. You can tell that so much thought and work was put into this record and the more I listen to the tracks, the more I’m starting to understand that self-discovery and growing up is rough and confusing, but also still so beautiful. And I don’t think there’s any better way to discover oneself than to turn the Melodrama up as loud as I can.