If you're like me-- and given the viewership numbers of this blog, there's a good chance you are me-- you love Lorde. And for better or worse, the consensus surrounding her new album, Solar Power, is that it's much more upbeat than her previous one, Melodrama. One way to quantify this is to run sentiment analysis on the album's lyrics.

To the extent that sentiment score matters, the takeaway is not that Solar Power's lyrics are remarkably upbeat; the album is actually slightly less positive than Pure Heroine. Instead, it seems Melodrama was just incredibly, undeniably negative.
As for individual songs, Melodrama contains multitudes. Not only does it have the most negatively scored song of Lorde's entire catalog ("Writer In the Dark"), it also has her most positively scored song ("The Louvre"). By contrast, Solar Power grades out as the most tonally balanced album (measured by standard deviation of song sentiment).
For kicks, I also wanted to see how these sentiment scores compared to the most recent albums by Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers, whom my more music-savvy friends seem to regard as World Champions of Sad Songs. In truth, I'm not sure whether their most recent albums are a representative sample. And it goes without saying, but sentiment analysis can't tell us how truly affecting or heartbreaking these songs are-- you could blow "Writer In the Dark" out of the water with a song that just says "death" 50 times.
With that in mind, let's reduce poetry to cold, hard numbers by plotting the Lorde albums' scores alongside those for Mitski's Be the Cowboy and Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher.

Negative sentiment MVP for Mitski: "A Horse Named Cold Air"
Negative sentiment MVP for Phoebe Bridgers: "Savior Complex"
BORING METHODOLOGY: The abbreviated scoop on the kind of analysis we performed here is that it looks at whether words are positive, negative, or neutral, and then assigns the corpus (lmao) an overall score based on the ratio of positive to negative words. For instance, "I love good movies" would grade positively because "love" and "good" have positive connotations, while "War is hell" would earn a negative score for obvious reasons. "The atmosphere was terrific, but the food was terrible" would be somewhere in the middle. Yes, this is crazy imprecise, but we're only just having fun here! A cooler analysis (maybe for the future) would be looking at the music instead of the lyrics-- analyzing beats per minute, danceability, and so on!
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