People are calling Lorde's long-awaited new release 'the best pop album of 2017'

"Melodrama," Lorde's first album in four years following the debut that made her a star with its hit single "Royals," is finally here. Released on Friday, it's getting great reviews so far.

It's a darker turn from 2013's "Pure Heroine," which was written when she was just 16 years old.

On "Melodrama," Lorde proves that while she's still only 20, she has the maturity to write and make emotional pop music that stands out from the rest, all while managing an Instagram account that reviews onion rings. (Yes, really.)

"Melodrama" is moody, honest, but will still make you want to dance.

Here's what critics are saying about Lorde's long-awaited second album:

It's a successful leap in tone and sound from her first album, "Pure Heroine."

"With 'Melodrama,' the best modern-pop album of 2017 so far, Lorde has taken a particularly big record-to-record leap. Will album 3 represent as significant a jump as album 2… and maybe take less than four years to do it? As James Comey might say: Lorde, I hope so." —Variety

It's moody and experimental.

"Lorde's writing and fantastically intimate vocals, ranging from her witchy, unprocessed low-register warbles to all sorts of digitized masks, make it matter." —Rolling Stone

It's very personal, and despite being only 20 years old, Lorde captures a lot of emotions.

"Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom." —Pitchfork

It's smart pop music.

"For all its odd misfires, it makes a great deal of the stuff that sits alongside it in the charts look pretty feeble by comparison. If that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t meant to be: if it was easy to make hugely successful mainstream pop music as smart as this, then everybody would be at it. And they patently aren’t." —The Guardian

While it's raw and filled with emotions, you'll still want to dance to it.

"Fueled by a black humor that’s almost become her trademark, there’s heartbreak and ecstasy, desire, fear, uncertainty, acting on impulse, making mistakes and (maybe) learning from them. And those are tunes we can definitely dance to." —The Independent

It's still pop, but Lorde's voice makes it unique to the genre.

"Writing about parties and untrue love, Lorde risks joining the pop pack instead of upending it the way she did with 'Pure Heroine.' But she still has the immediacy of her voice, with its smokiness, melancholy, and barely suppressed rage, and she refuses to let her lyrics resolve into standard pop postures; she understands temptation, complicity, and self-sabotage as well as self-righteousness." —The New York Times