“Ribs” by Lorde

"Ribs" lives on Pure Heroine, the 2013 debut album from New Zealand's Lorde, and on 30 September that year Universal made it a promotional single. She wrote it with Joel Little, who produced, engineered and mixed it and played on it too, and it's electropop with indietronica shadows, the lights turned way down.

What it's really about is the anxiety of getting older, and that's what critics fastened on when they praised it; it keeps turning up in rankings of her best songs. She has sung it on David Letterman's Late Show and all through her touring years, from Pure Heroine to Ultrasound, and after "What Was That" came out in 2025 it caught a second wind, landing on charts it had never reached before.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.