She can warn of a doomed-to-fail fling on the horizon, then run toward it like a storm chaser, pulling you along for the ride. Yet the 21-year-old’s real talent is the way her dispatches can exist at once in the middle of heartbreak and totally removed from it. (That's why her hair is so big - it's full of feelings!) The case for Lorde as her generation’s finest lyricist is easy to make here: What other pop star can name-drop pseudoephedrine in the middle of a verse about a post-breakup haze with the ease of a nursery rhyme? And basking in the glow of Jack Antonoff’s oddball synth-pop beats, every image and punchline hits like a cup of your alma mater’s jungle juice. But that changed with Melodrama, an album that documents the rushes of young love with such precision, even the most jaded among us will feel the flicker of butterfly wings in their guts as they listen.

On 2013’s Pure Heroine, she examined the rituals of her fellow teens with a poeticism capable of convincing the legal-drinking set that they were underachieving slackers - not to mention a prodigious wisdom that inspired some truthers to half-jokingly search for a birth certificate. The joke was that listening to Lorde was supposed to make you feel old.

Comin out strong genius