On Tuesday night, I found myself standing on a trash can in Washington Square Park, surrounded by a critical mass of the NYU student body. Other spectators had climbed trees or lamp posts, and before the scheduled event could begin, park rangers and cops arrived to break up the crowd. Lorde, our resident “prettier Jesus,” commands an audience like few of her peers. “Since I was 17, I gave you everything,” she sings on “What Was That”—her first original single in four years—further tussling with the messianic complex of young stardom she so thoroughly lambasted on 2021’s Solar Power. While that album’s aughts-informed folk-pop swerved away from the spotlight, it appears Lorde has since decided to give the people exactly what they want, and what they want, unsurprisingly, is Melodrama part two.

“What Was That” is the sound of a decade passing in the blink of an eye, a first gasp for air after coming up from a dive in the pool. Lorde’s always had a knack for sifting through the fleeting passions of youth, even in their midst, and her writing is as evocative and rich as ever. But with so much of the action necessarily taking place in the past tense—we kissed for hours, I remember saying, I gave you everything—“What Was That” misses out on a sense of revelation, and it’s undercut at every turn by Jim-E Stack and Dan Nigro’s bloodless production. Recall “Green Light”’s galloping pianos, how “Perfect Places” popped like fireworks or maybe gunshots, or the way the razor-edged synths on “Hard Feelings/Loveless” sheared through the mix, instead of limply squeaking by as they do here. Drugs have often been Lorde’s narrative device of choice; “Pure Heroine is alcohol, Melodrama is MDMA, and Solar Power is cannabis,” she told Vogue in 2021. One only wishes “What Was That” did justice to molly-wide pupils or the memory of the “best cigarette of my life.” Then again, the high’s never as good the second time around.