“Mood Ring,” the song that, in my opinion, one of Lorde’s best songs, is set from the satirical perspective of a young girl who looks in all of the wrong places for happiness. In an interview with Genius, Lorde goes through the thoughts and actions of this young girl, and how she looks everywhere from crystals to vitamins to foreign countries to escape the anxiety and inner chaos of life. Lorde uses the metaphor of a “mood ring” to show how distant people are from their inner emotions. “I can’t feel a thing,” expresses Lorde, “I keep looking at my mood ring/Tell me how I’m feeling/ Floating away, floating away.”
As a teenager living in the pop-culture world of self-help hacks and wellness journeys, I can definitely say that I have felt pressure to be this perfectly put-together person. I think that we all can fall victim to online-advice; we try to solve our deep-rooted issues through superficial tricks rather than truly taking the time to reflect and change. Lorde advises fans to listen to themselves and their own personal needs rather than turning to the internet, which is often the root of these issues, to fix their surface-level problems.