(Credits: Thistle Brown)
Sat 3 January 2026 4:00, UK
There aren’t really any child stars left in the music industry, are there? In fact, Lorde may have been among the last of an almost obsolete phenomenon.
But when Lorde first started treading the boards of the music industry, the sights of pop regalia and royalty were far less certain in her sights. After all, back in 2009, young Ella Yelich-O’Connor from Auckland, New Zealand, was only 13 years old. Mapping out the course of the rest of her life was the last thing on her mind.
Yet there had always been something different in the sheer presence of the future star. At the age of just six years old, she was classed as a gifted child with superior intelligence. Her passion for music, lyrics, and the whole beguiling world of songwriting soon took over the dreams of academic glory, however.
Like most kids, her pursuits of fame in the early days were rather rudimentary. She started out by forming a duo with her friend Louis McDonald, where they won their school talent competition before going on to perform on a local radio station. At that point, they covered the seminal tracks ‘Mama Do’ by Pixie Lott and ‘Use Somebody’ by Kings of Leon – it was 2009, after all.
However, McDonald’s father saw an opportunity and grabbed it by sending the demo tapes of those covers to Scott Maclachlan, an A&R executive at Universal Music Group. Despite clearly wanting his son in tow, the label was only interested in McDonald’s pitch because of the future Lorde starlet. Subsequently, she was signed to the label on a development deal. She was only 13 years old, but the journey had already begun.
How did the label develop Lorde into a pop powerhouse?
Thankfully, the label was not so short-sighted as to plunge their new singing protégé into the deep end of the business, where her naivety and lack of experience would have undeniably seen her drown. Instead, she spent the next few years continuing with school, still performing with McDonald, all the while being paired with different songwriters and producers to varying degrees of success.
At the age of 15, she fell into orbit with the songwriter Joel Little, and the pair went on to write an EP that would later be known as The Love Club. You don’t need it to be spelt out any further from there. It became a sensation on SoundCloud, then was officially released by Universal Music Group, and there was no point in looking back.
It is unquestionably funny how introspective and reflective teenagers can be when they’re running on so little experience. Fast forward to 2013, and Lorde was caught saying in interviews that her early songwriting, from only a few years prior, was “crazy shit about what was happening at that moment. I actually went back through my laptop the other day and found all those songs, and it’s super embarrassing!”
Yet it also displayed the nascent making of a powerhouse, as someone who could develop and hone their craft in such a short amount of time that they were almost unrecognisable. Then came the album breakthrough of Pure Heroine later that same year, and there was no debating anymore: the label had made the right call in signing that 13-year-old. Lorde was going to be a superstar, and that was that.
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