Lorde is the stage name of the 20-year old singer-songwriter from New Zealand, whose real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (whew!!). Her new album, Melodrama, is a testament of her reemergence from her breakup with her ex-boyfriend James Lowe in 2015.

If one could use one phrase to describe this album, it would be "authentic, reflective, and resonating". Here are ten life lessons Lorde has taught us through her ten songs:

1. Green Light

"Sometimes I wake up in a different bedroom
I whisper things, the city sings 'em back to you"

As the lead single of the album, Green Light is like a powerful page from a personal diary. It's a page filled with lifelong passions, romantic love, words of motivation, but also with heartbreaks, regrets (long-term and short-term ones), fear, and yearning for a voice that agrees. Sometimes we feel like the whole world is not in agreement with our course of action, and we want to be above all things. We want to go forward, give it our 100%, and bury the ax from the past.

Lorde doesn't offer a solution for your heartbreaks, instead, she hopes to guide us with her past experiences. She tells us that this is her story and it is just as real, and she wanted the resurrection of the green light too.

2. Sober

"We're sleeping through all the days
I'm acting like I don't see every
Ribbon you used to tie yourself to me"

Ah, our daily dosage of generation Z / millennial hopelessness, but instead of patronizing us, Lorde sits cross-legged across the coffee table and peels open every layer that we've put on ourselves today to contribute to an image. She's here to save us and possibly destroy us at the same time.

Regardless of how you take this, she's one of us, she's willing to be one of us, and not that many singers as talented as her could articulate our ambivalence toward love as vivid and straightforward as her, in this song particularly.

3. Homemade Dynamite

Let's let things come out of the woodwork
I'll give you my best side, tell you all my best lies
Yeah, awesome right?

If the song "Sober" is telling us to proceed with caution, then "Homemade Dynamite" is showing us a world without care. The line quoted above is a shout-out to the listeners ------ Lorde ponders if she should craft this album into the caricature of a perfect life, or if she should be more honest about who she is.

Many of us believe that it's the latter.

In this song, the protagonist aims to blow things out of order, become inspired by the freedom of living, and enjoy spur of the moment. We would be lying if we say we have not done the same, and we would be lying even more if we say Lorde is not giving us a voice, a much needed one.

4. The Lourve

"I overthink your p-punctuation use
Not my fault, just a thing that my mind do."

The stammering is probably one of the most clever things Lorde's ever done in her songs. In this one, she targets a common affliction of ours ------ the burden of overthinking.

Somehow, we want the end goal of our actions to be somewhere pristine, grand, and exquisite like the Lourve, alive or dead. Let's take texting as an example: whether it is our emoji choices in text messaging or a word we might say, we carefully choose them so that things don't go down in flames. We really think that everything will end by the touch of our fingertips.

But don't we see how ridiculous it is sometimes?

5. Liability

"So I guess I'll go home
Into the arms of the girl that I love
The only love I haven't screwed up"

The Girl" here stands for Lorde herself, after everyone has gotten tired of her. As she grows from her overnight fame at the age of 16, she finds the world around her changing as she remains the same. Later in the song, she finds herself like forest fire, so hard to please. The journey to self-love and self-awareness is paralleled with her journey to acceptance from the outside, and at the end of the day, she could only dance with herself in her mind, because she feels liable for people leaving and mindsets changing.

It's our response to bad situations that causes suffering, not the situations themselves. Lorde pinpoints that suffering and tells the world how she feels, with messages about self-care and the creative destruction that comes with it.

6. Hard Feelings / Loveless

"When you've outgrown a lover
The whole world knows but you" --- from Hard Feelings

This title combines two songs, "Hard Feelings" and "Loveless", together. It describes a vicious cycle of a person getting hurt, and that person ends up hurting others the same way. It's extremely personal but quite universal how humans interact this way.

"We're L-O-V-E-L-E-S-S
generation" --- from Loveless

I hear this as a chant, as some sort of boastful announcement that love as a commodity is something that never takes deep roots.

This verse speaks from the perspective of a daring, witty, and wounded soul that many of us possess. This generation isn't loveless, but as we are scrambling to redefine romance in an age where things can be easily turned into commodities, we find it easier to jump from place to place and taste-test all there is to offer. The amplification of the amount of information we are able to obtain gives us tunnel vision, and in this tunnel, we are struggling to see concrete things because we have not had the time or the patience to process it all.

Therefore, Lorde is pointing out that acting immune to love is a coping mechanism that we feel will last us for as long as youth lasts, a youth that is captured in multiple forms of media and platforms, but hesitates when it's in the existence of another person; with all their flesh and bones and gruesome and blissful experiences. Those are great, but too great for us sometimes.

7. Sober II (Melodrama)

"They'll talk about us, all the lovers
How we kissed and killed each other, ooh oh."

Questions such as "who is this 'they' Lorde is singing about?" are asked when this song piques the creative interest of not only her team, but also her listeners.

Truthfully, "they" represents everyone who looks back in the year of 2017, a year of new media revolutions, identity politics, white supremacy in action (as explained by this Vox video). "Us" can be enlarged or shrunken into different scopes, it could be a select few or the human race as a whole.

This "them vs. us" narrative feeds back to the title of the album Melodrama, a term that could be used to define the current state of the union. Lorde addresses the world conflicts without mentioning a word of politics, and how those conflicts move us.

8. Writer in the Dark

"I still feel you, now and then
Slow like pseudo-ephedrine"

"When you see me, will you say I've changed?"

Lorde picked up a guitar and a piece of her heart, and then there is a ballad about her relationship. She isn't the first mainstream-leaning singer/songwriter to sing about her ex, but she addresses this in such a bold, first-person way that it's hard to miss the brilliance behind it.

She mentions how the world and the seasons change around her, and she wishes that she has changed with them. It's a very common sentiment to want to appear like we have evolved from painful experiences as a perfect person, when in reality we are far from it.

"Writer in the Dark" also refers to Lorde herself.

9. Supercut

"This is just a supercut of us"

Every song in this album ties back into the New Media somehow. When I think "supercut", I think of VSCO cam-filtered photographs and perfectly captured moments that faltered the moment the camera did.

In our heads too.

Lorde addresses a lover in second person narrative, revealing how she idealizes their relationship and their love. We learn that when there is a problem with a situation, there is no use in hiding it. But we could not help but create a collage of perfect moments in our heads, and play it over and over. Sometimes, it's easier to live in a beautiful "supercut" of real life than realizing that maybe it's not working out.

Lorde was not boasting when she calls this album "fresh new sounds in her mind"------ this song epitomizes a common affliction of every single human being, through the lens of a singer who struggles to find the balance between the spotlight and her personal life. Great job, Ella, at giving us a song to fall back on.

10. Perfect Places

"This is how we get notorious!"

Last but certainly not least on our list is "Perfect Places"

Lorde sings in plural first person narrative, and just like the title, she takes us on a journey to find a space without flaws. We begin to follow a set of rules, presenting ourselves in certain ways to fit the crowd, and shredding away certain aspects of our personality in order to feel admired and "cool". Yes, this journey is a collaborative one, but we could barely stand the loneliness.

This song encapsulates the melodrama of living in today's world. Restless and energetic, we want instantaneous feedback. No apology is needed, because when it comes to these perfect places, nobody could turn away.

These ten lessons Lorde gives us through her songs shows her growth from her first ever album "Pure Heroine". She could be seen as this regal, one of a kind, and unattainable goddess/singer in our hearts, but truth be told, she is just like any one of us. Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, a New Zealand girl who has been singing all her life and often took years to craft her songs, hasn't departed from who she was when she decided to make a statement in her very first song "Royals", debuted No.1 in New Zealand...

That we are all in this together.