Meet Lorde. This 16-year-old is changing the music industry.

By MAMAMIA TEAM

In case you didn’t get the memo, Miley Cyrus isn’t a Disney star anymore. In the clip for her latest music video, We Can’t Stop, the 20-year-old singer tries to break further away from her wholesome child-star image.

It’s clocked up over 43 million views since it’s June 19 release, it broke Vevo’s all-time record for views in a 24-hour period with 10.7 million views, and it’s not because it’s an incredible song.

The video features Cyrus writhing on a bed in white spandex, ‘twerking’, tongue pashing a Barbie doll in a pool, some token girl-on-girl wrestling and a scene where smoke comes out of her pants, naturally.

And as all cool music videos have these days, it features a bunch of nonsensical props like giant soft toys, a skull made out of hot chips and slices bread – lots of bread.

As to not subject you to 3:30 minutes of it, we’ve wrapped up the gist of the video (gifs via Buzzfeed):

Now take a look at this music video from 16-year-old New Zealand pop sensation, Lorde.

If you can’t watch it just now, it features her guy friends, a local train station and her old sweater. You won’t see over-sexualised posing, nor is anyone spanking themselves while riding a stationary bike.

Refreshing isn’t it?

If you search Google Images for pictures of Lorde you won’t find any of her twerking in tight lycra spandex or in various states of nudity. The teenager, real name Ella Yelich-O’Connor, isn’t even into selfies. In fact you’ll only one selfie of her on the internet – her Twitter profile picture.

It’s almost the antithesis of what Miley Cyrus is doing with her image.

She tells NYMag.com: “I’m quite selective about imagery. I like that cleanliness. They Google you and they see the one photo of you. Only now can I do that. I’m not sure that will last much longer. At first, there were no photographs. It was something I cultivated, as I started to grow. But I could feel people getting aggressive, like, show yourself already. I mean, I understand. I write pop music. People aren’t used to not being able to put a face or a body to it. So I was like, all right. I didn’t want to turn it into thing.”

And while she lives with her parents, she isn’t writing tortured love songs about her ex-boyfriends in her bedroom and she clearly doesn’t like being compared to Taylor Swift.

When asked if her ex-boyfriends should be worried about the biographical nature of her songwriting, she quips: “No, no. I try to stay away from talking about boys all the time. You can go to Taylor Swift to hear that.”

Yelich-O’Connor is four years younger than Cyrus, and should in theory, be less resistant to the self-centred culture of today’s society. But instead she is very selective about how her image is portrayed rather than instagramming duckface selfies or posing in g-strings like Rihanna. Let’s hope it lasts.