The 'sophomore slump' may have claimed its share of budding popstars, but Lorde has officially sidestepped the second album curse spectacularly.
Melodrama, Lorde's new album, has gifted the NZ singer her first No.1 album in the US and Canada, and her second No.11 album in New Zealand and Australia, after 2013's breakthrough Pure Heroine.
The album toppled Katy Perry's Witness off the top of the US's Billboard chart, and slayed Ed Sheeran's overachieving Divide both in Australia and her home country.
The singer, real name Ella Yelich-O'Connor, took to Twitter to post an epic note in which she thanked her fans for the album's success.
"Royals was, to quote David Chase, 'a moonshot, a dreadnought'," she wrote, borrowing a line The Sopranos creator once used to describe the series' contentious closing episode.
"There were no such guarantees with Melodrama – that's why this means so much."
"When I was a kid, I thought big records had to be made a certain way – to be sterile and calculated in craft, that something had to be sacrificed.
"I have had the divine thrill of disproving that firsthand, twice over," she wrote.
The album, led by the infectious single Green Light, has been met with universal critical acclaim, with Fairfax music critic Bernard Zuel describing its introspective-yet-ambitious tones as "a particularly 2017 album, in the best possible way".
The singer, 20, had previously spoken out on her fears about leaving her teenage years behind and the trusted perspective that had made her a sage voice to a generation of young listeners.
"All my life I've been obsessed with adolescence, drunk on it," she wrote in a lengthy Facebook post last November, where she publicly worried if her creative well had run dry. She later described Melodrama's lyrics as the "best I've written in my life".
Lorde will be touring the album with a series of outdoor shows across five Australian cities in November, including two gigs at the Sydney Opera House forecourt.
