Where previous generations of teenagers frequently had to endure marketing managers’ ideas of what entertainment should look like, millennial teens were blessed with one of pop culture’s greatest young laureates: New Zealand’s Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (aka Lorde). After being spotted at a talent show and signing to Universal at age 12, she would experiment with a series of writing partners before meeting Joel Little, a fellow Auckland native and former pop-punk frontman. Together, they wrote “Royals,” a song that not only defined Lorde’s perspective—with its unimpressed, teenage dismissal of material obsessions—but also propelled her skeletal electro-pop debut, 2013’s Pure Heroine, to a Grammy nomination. She captured the late-night trains home, clandestine kisses, and heavy symbolism of one’s first love remembering to buy them their favorite juice—little of which, she seemed to know, lasts. But Lorde’s feel for suburban adolescent disconnect catalyzed into precocious power moves—such as curating the soundtrack for the third Hunger Games movie—and an astute lens on the wider world on 2017’s Melodrama. Richer in sound and experience, the album found strength in different kinds of isolation—the temporary plight of the newly heartbroken and the lifelong fate of the writer. Lorde would steer that fate in a new direction with 2021’s breezy, Laurel Canyon-hued mid-pandemic release Solar Power, which basked in psych-folk, sunshine pop, and tongue-in-cheek euphoria. When Lorde reemerged in 2025 with her fourth studio album, Virgin, the sunny vibes of Solar Power gave way to a more introspective exploration of identity that revisited the bold electronic pop of Pure Heroine and Melodrama but from a hard-earned, more vulnerable vantage point. “Kind of like a photo of yourself that you don’t love,” she told Apple Music, “but captures something true about you.”