A sixteen-year-old made a record about being sixteen, and refused to make it sound glamorous. Pure Heroine, out in 2013, was co-written start to finish with one collaborator, Joel Little, in Auckland. No committee of producers, no guest stars, no rented gloss. Two people and a lot of empty space.

The whole album is suburban teenage anti-glamour, on purpose. It is about driving around your own dull town, about friends and boredom and the strange power of having nothing, set to finger snaps and bass and her voice stacked into a quiet crowd. Where pop was selling diamonds and fast cars, she wrote about the opposite and made the opposite sound cooler. That tension, plain life rendered with total assurance, is the engine of the thing.

It should have been a small, clever local record. Instead it went everywhere, and proved that restraint could outsell excess. The album’s case against luxury is sharpest on its biggest song, the one that reads like a crown and works, on a second listen, like a flat refusal. Start there, and watch what she does with almost nothing.