This article was originally published on June 27, 2025

The day has come. Our Lord(e) and Saviour has risen. Ella Yelich-O’Connor has released her fourth studio album, Virgin, and her fans on the team are unanimous: it’s a masterpiece. To celebrate, we’ve delved into her discography to rank 20 of her best tracks. This was arguably the hardest top 20 list we have ever compiled at Dazed HQ, with our meeting almost descending into blows, but we gave it a go.

20.“YELLOW FLICKER BEAT”

At just 17, Lorde was chosen to curate the entire Hunger Games: Mockingjay soundtrack – and out of that came the smouldering track, “Yellow Flicker Beat”. While made for Katniss, it’s unmistakably a Lorde song -  a track about becoming, about fighting back, until something more primal breaks through the surface. You can feel the revolution simmering beneath the beat, before it erupts in lines like, “They used to shout my name, now they whisper it.” (TM)

19. “HOLD NO GRUDGE”

Featured on the deluxe edition of Solar Power, “Hold No Grudge” is slightly more high-tempo than the rest of Solar Power. With its layered vocals and catchy chorus, she sings about the sadness of falling out with someone dear to you, reminiscing on your once shared closeness and how now you can’t even remember each other’s birthdays. But within that separation, why hold onto the hate? Why hold a grudge?

Solar Power was critiqued for being an album about “wellness” due to its aesthetics, and released at a time when we were at peak wellness discourse fatigue. Still, there is something wonderful about Solar Power and this particular song’s dedication to self-betterment, to healing one’s hurt and letting things go. This is advice a lot of people (me especially) need. (HJ)

18.“OCEANIC FEELINGS/ HINE-I-TE-AWATEA”

Solar Power is Lorde’s most divisive album, but to me, it is perfect – and it has an even more perfect ending with “Oceanic Feeling”. It is a song of pure gratitude for the earth that we inhabit and the people in it. It always makes me cry (as most Lorde songs do) when she sings explicitly about her brother: “Baby boy, you’re super cool / I know you’re scared, so was I / but all will be revealed in time.” It is a song of reassurance, forcing you to stop for a moment and look around at what you have (love), and what you will have in the future (also love). You just have to breathe out and tune in.  

The Māori version of the song is also a personal fave of mine. Though Lorde was accused of tokenism through releasing Te Ao Mārama, the extended play of Solar Power in the Māori language, Morgan Godfery argued that Te Ao Mārama is a “pop culture landmark” that should be welcome: “Children need a pop culture and a social media that speaks Māori. Lorde contributed to that, under the direction and supervision of some of our greatest language champions. As a second language speaker, I recognise that as a public good.” (HJ)

17. “HAMMER”

An “ode to city life and horniness”, the third single from Virgin finds Lorde deep in her rebirth. Punctured with sharp synths that spike through the track’s driving beat, Hammer distils the euphoria of a come-up, complete with a vocal climax (quite literally) and flashes of dancefloor ecstasy. Shot in one of London’s cruising hotspots, the accompanying music video sees Lorde embracing chaos in all forms at Hampstead Heath: steaming up car windows, getting tattooed against a tree, and revelling in the ecstasy of simply being alive.

At its core, Hammer is about uncertainty – about wanting more, but not quite knowing what more is. In that way, it’s refreshing. This time, Lorde isn’t here to guide us; she’s in the thick of it with us, reminding us that no one has it all figured out, and sometimes, that’s exactly the point. (TM)

16. “BRAVADO”

“Bravado” is one of Lorde’s most underrated songs. Released in 2013 as the opening track of The Love Club EP, it is repetitive, addictive and the beat is hard as fuck. At 16 years old, she wrote lyrics like “It’s in your bloodstream / a collision of atoms that happens before your eyes / It’s a marathon run or a mountain you scaled without thinking of size.” “Bravado” is so confident and cool, a reminder of how fearless young people are and continue to be! (HJ)

15. “HARD FEELINGS”

I don’t think many other songs have captured so elegantly and evocatively the experience of heartbreak, when even something as banal as a couple’s trip to the big Sainsbury’s is excruciating to recall. “Hard Feelings” reminds me of being as down bad as I’ve ever been, living in conditions not dissimilar to Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ yet still relating to lyrics like “I light all my candles, cut flowers for all of my rooms, I care for myself the way I used to care about you” – that’s the power of art! 

While Jack Antonoff’s career may be hit and miss, I will never jump aboard any backlash against the man who produced this song and this album. The production is incredible: the single synth line that rings out when she sings the lyrics above, the double-tracking vocals which echo “why even try to get right?”, the metallic, distorted clanging towards the end as the grief builds to a crescendo. “Hard Feelings” is one of the highlights of his partnership with Lorde, a perfect song and a breakup classic that people will find solace in for decades to come. (JG)

14. “DAVID”

Lorde came across like a spiritual guide in Solar Power (even while insisting she was no one’s saviour), but Virgin finds her far less sure of herself, lost and heartbroken. “David” is confessional and desperate, as love so often makes us. It is a loud, static ballad that commands attention, and the world is listening!! It is the perfect ending to this perfectly imperfect album. (HJ)

13. “THE LOUVRE”

Lorde is often stereotyped as a member of the “sad girl” canon, but she’s just as adept at depicting the highs of love as well as the lows. “The Louvre”, with its grandiose declarations and imagery of “summer slipping underneath [her] tongue” is happy, even if in a slightly deranged and brittle way. As she said herself in an interview, she wanted to capture the “big sun-soaked dumbness of falling in love”. 

She pulled this off, but with Lorde it’s never that simple. The affair never actually sours over the course of the song, but the music warns us what’s coming: the chiming guitars of the outro – a genuinely transcendent piece of music – are desperately yearning and forlorn. That sense of impending loss makes the promise of those early days, the manic rush of being a “sweetheart psychopathic crush” who “blows all my friendships to sit in hell with you”, all the more intense. It might not be a model for a healthy attachment style, but “The Louvre” is one of the best love songs of the 21st century – or ever! (JG)

12.“SUPERCUT”

One of the things Lorde does best is take a universal experience and turn it into a song you want to dance and cry to, in whichever order. On “Supercut”, she is yearning for a past relationship, except it’s an idealised, edited version where only the good parts exist. 

Made with Jack Antonoff, the production feels urgent and sonically mimics a racing heart. “In my head, I do everything right,” she sings, as she reflects on the relationship. It’s one of her more cinematic songs, perfectly placed to soundtrack a highlight reel montage which ends in heartbreak. The beat on “in your car the radio up” might be one of the catchiest little pre-chorus lines ever. (HD)

11. “BROKEN GLASS”

If her verse on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix saw her at war with her body, “Broken Glass” finds her picking apart the wreckage. Layered over electro-pop synths, the track is a transparent confessional where Lorde grapples with body image and disordered eating. With bruised lyrics like “I wanna punch the mirror to make her see that this won’t last,” she treads the broken glass of recovery’s contradictions to deliver one of her most unfiltered songs to date. (TM)

10. “400 LUX”

“400 Lux” is the soundtrack to a very specific kind of teenage boredom. In the track, Lorde documents the mundane side of youth: the same people, the same parties, but all charged with the same restless pursuit of meaning that teenage boredom aches for (“Got a lot to not do.”)

With a low-humming beat that feels like driving through half-asleep suburbs, it takes me back to growing up in a rural village – weekends in fields, grim local pubs, and half-lit hall parties where nothing really happened, but everything felt like it could. Lyrics like “We’re hollow like the bottles that we drain” still hit with that glossed-over ego of teenage angst that underpins Pure Heroine. At one point, it was even my Instagram bio. (TM)

9. “THE PATH”

‘Celebrities complaining about the perils of fame’ can sometimes be an annoying theme, but “The Path” features some of Lorde’s finest lyrics. From describing herself as a “teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash” who “grew up in the age of Oxycontin” to the “supermodel’s dancing around a pharaoh's tomb” at some gaudy Met Gala-esque event, they are vivid, evocative and specific.

Lorde wants to lure us away from the shallowness of celebrity culture and towards the redemptive power of nature, and the music really sweeps you along into this vision: the opening guitar riff, which sounds like if Kurt Cobain had written a song for The Beach soundtrack; the jazzy flute which snakes its way in, the ecstatic choral backing vocals at the end – it’s all so lush and mysterious and enticing. “The Path” has convinced me: I’m smashing my phone into pieces with a hammer and moving to rural New Zealand. (JG)

8. “SHAPESHIFTER”

“Shapeshifter” is an immediate standout from Virgin. Jim-E Stack’s production is rich and deeply satisfying: the gentle, drum-and-bassy beat (think Burial meets David Gray), staccato strings and minimalist piano line all come together perfectly. The lyrics are just as good, providing a twisty, ambiguous account of casual sex – the possibilities for pleasure and reinvention alongside the dissatisfaction and feigned indifference (“I’ll kick you out and pull you in, swear that you were just a friend and when it’s all over again, say I’m not affected”) – and one of her most memorable refrains in “tonight I just wanna fall.”

Lorde has always been a master of the sad-at-the-club banger, which “Shapeshifter” takes in a new direction. While clearly influenced by dance music, it’s more restrained than the likes of “Supercut” or “Green Light”, and maybe better suited to a wistful ride home on the night bus than the party itself. It sounds different to anything she’s done before, while still sharing an atmosphere with the best of Pure Heroine or Ribs. (JG)

7. “LIABILITY”

When Melodrama came out in 2017, “Liability” was one of the songs that took many of her fans by surprise. Confessional and exposing even by the standards of her previous work, it stands out as one of her saddest songs. It has the perfect formula for a good sad girl song: a soft piano ballad where she sings the all too common feelings of thinking you’re too much, a burden who takes up too much space. I mean… the award for most painful chorus goes to: “They say, ‘You're a little much for me, you're a liability’ … so they pull back, make other plans”. After Lorde famously went on Hot Ones and devoured those spicy wings with ease, multiple people online joked that only someone who could know enough pain to write “Liability” could survive that.

Special mention to “Liability (Reprise)”, which, for the sake of honouring her other best songs, cannot get its own spot on this list but is equally as perfect and beautiful. (HD)

6. “GREEN LIGHT”

Let the records show that I wanted this to be placed higher on the list but, unfortunately, Dazed is a democracy and I didn’t get my way, even after threatening to resign. Like any number of her songs, “Green Light” blends melancholy and euphoria, but it’s probably her most propulsive – it’s definitely the one I’d most like to hear on the dance floor or while running a marathon. It’s so exciting that it makes me feel like I could punch through a brick wall every time I listen to it. But I’LL be seeing YOU wherever I go!!!

The lyrics are about getting over heartbreak, or at least opening yourself up to the possibility, but it’s no trite, feel-good anthem – the process of healing is depicted is as fraught and occasionally embittered (“she thinks you love the beach, you’re such a damn liar!”) The overall effect, encompassing the pounding drum beat, Lorde’s vocals, and the strangely jaunty piano loop of the pre-chorus, is electrifying. It also has one of the best videos of the century - if you haven’t tried to recreate it while walking home from the club, headphones on and throwing yourself around the street, are you really a Lorde fan? (JG)

5. “A WORLD ALONE”

“A World Alone” has an atmosphere shared by many of the best Lorde songs: sad, but too majestic and buzzing with the possibilities of life to be depressing. The lyrics really capture the defiant ‘us and against the world’ mentality that often comes with being in love, particularly when you’re young and it’s easy to convince yourself, for no particular reason, that you and your latest squeeze are Bonnie and Clyde, Romeo and Juliet, Connell and Marianne. No one – not the fake friends studying business, the double-edged people and their schemes – can stand in your way. It’s a dizzyingly romantic song and the production is excellent: the beat is as danceable as anything Lorde’s ever done, and the plaintive guitar line, which rings throughout, is the perfect counterpart to her lyrics. (JG)

4. “STONED AT THE NAIL SALON”

“Stoned at the Nail Salon” is, in my opinion, one of Solar Power’s best songs. I’d argue that it should be HIGHER on this list, but alas, I will concede defeat on that front. The best thing about Lorde is her reflective nature. She writes about her life, as it is all she knows. In this song, she reflects on ageing, the passage of time, and the inevitable changes that come with it. She questions if her high state is making her melodramatic, a way to quell her anxieties, which are still there, lurking under the surface. When I first heard this song, I could not stop crying. It makes me so sad and continues to do so, but I am grateful to have a musician like Lorde who chronicles time in this way. The song is a reminder that we are truly not alone in the strangeness and sadness that comes with growing up. (HJ)

3. “PERFECT PLACES”

“Perfect Places” is to me the perfect comedown anthem disguised as a sweaty dancing-at-the-end-of-a-party track. Positioned at the end of Melodrama, it is both euphoric and introspective. Over crisp drums and a slow-burning synth line, Lorde spirals through party burnout, loneliness, and youthful disillusionment, asking: “What the fuck are perfect places anyway?”

But instead of being nihilistic, it embraces the messiness of young adulthood – the drugs, partying and sex. She’s 19 and “on fire”, full of shame but still hopeful enough to search for a place, metaphorically and literally, that represents something greater. It’s a song that brings together all the themes of Melodrama with buzzy production and all-too-real lyricism. (HD)

2. “WRITER IN THE DARK”

In the past, Lorde has spoken about her relationship with writing and how she feels about immortalising relationships, people and feelings in her songs. On the pre-chorus to “Writer In The Dark”, she sings “bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark / now she's gonna play and sing and lock you in her heart”.

As a writer, it’s a song that raises many questions. When a relationship ends, who gets to decide who shares the story? Does sharing the details of a situation with the world take away from the magic of something sacred? How much of our parents’ behaviours change how we learn to love? It’s deeply introspective and heartbreakingly dreamy. Oh, and the first line of the chorus, “I am my mother’s child, I love you till my breathing stops”, is crazy work. Nothing further to say. (HD)

1. “RIBS”

An achingly nostalgic track, “Ribs” encapsulates the dizzying grief and thrill of growing up – and the devastating realisation that it will never be the same again. Written after a house party, when a then 16-year-old Lorde caught herself nearing the cusp of adolescence, “Ribs” became an anthem for anyone mourning the ephemerality of their teenage years. Laced with echoing synths and breathless repetition, reverberations of her simple line, “it feels so scary getting old,” speak to a generation raised with tangled earphones, and blown-out speakers blasting Pure Heroine on repeat. (TM)