Girl, so revealing: Lorde lets it all out

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

Lorde is standing in the middle of a Sydney dance floor, eyes closed, elated. And why wouldn't she be elated?
She's surrounded by wide-eyed, adoring fans at the CBD venue Mary's Underground, which is currently throwing a club night dedicated to her music. Her appearance is a complete surprise to attendees, and blurry social media footage captured the amusing moment fans turn and realise the woman brushing past them in the crowd is the real Ella Yelich-O'Connor.
Lorde isn't just there to hang up the back, and she joyfully throws herself amongst fans on the dance floor, briefly jumping behind the DJ decks to sing along to her hits. She was having such a good time that a spokesperson for Mary's Underground later told The Guardian that she 'almost refused to leave when her management were trying to usher her out'.
'It was so incredible, it was so sweet,' Lorde tells me a day after the festivities. 'These kids are so amazing… I could have watched them for hours, there was something so moving to me [about it]. It's one thing that it was my music, but I just find seeing people having shared experiences through pop music incredibly moving. It's a very special art form in that a whole bunch of people are brought together and something quite spiritual and physical happens in a club underground. It's so cool.'
It's a bright and beautifully clear late-autumn day, and Lorde and I are sitting in a quiet boardroom at the Eve Hotel in Redfern. It's curiously plonked right next to the rooftop pool area, which is a wash of deep reds, oranges, and blindingly white stone. When I remark to Lorde that this complex used to be (somewhat) fondly known by Sydneysiders as 'Murder Mall', she laughs. 'Yes, I heard about Murder Mall!' she says. 'It's crazy to be staying in Redfern at this stage of its evolution.'
Gentrification? 'Gentrification… exactly,' she says dryly, filling up a couple of water glasses on the long table.
The New Zealand singer isn't just in town to crash her own parties or survey the new Harris Farm, but rather to chat about her highly anticipated fourth album, Virgin. The promotional run for the album has been marked by frenetic fan gatherings and pop-ups – most notably the launch of the album's first single What Was That.
In April, Lorde had put the call-out to fans to head to Manhattan's Washington Square Park to hear the new single, but police quickly shut it down after the park became overcrowded. The singer still rocked up a few hours later, playing the song through some portable speakers assembled by her producer Dev Hynes (Blood Orange). Lorde stood on a small wooden platform in front of them, dancing to the screams of the crowd.
It's also been a time of revelation and openness, with Lorde talking at length in interviews and to her fans about her shifting gender identity, past struggles with disordered eating and body image, and the dissolution of her long-term relationship. These are some of the skeletons unearthed on Virgin.
No one is 'sort of' a fan of me. It's like you've got a tattoo, or you don't know who I am.
'I feel very alive in talking about it,' Lorde says slowly and carefully, her large grey eyes fixing on various points around the room. 'It is scary and vulnerable. It's one thing getting up against something difficult in a work of art in private, and then keeping it alive via talking and going back over it.
'Going into this album I had the sense that something very raw and close to the bone was wanting to come out of me, and that it would touch on all of these uncomfortable places and maybe even be a little bit violent,' she says.
'I often felt uncomfortable making this album. I basically felt uncomfortable the whole time. When you're pushing yourself to the bone, or [pushing] to only tell the truth… the only way I can think to describe it is that it makes you feel very alive.'
Lorde mentions a moment at the end of 2023 – 'a hard, hard, hard year… a lot of structures were coming down around me' – when she wrote a newsletter to fans that detailed some of her inner turmoil. She received a wave of support and love in response, and it took the air out of the pain.
'I'm finding it's a similar thing now,' she explains. 'As soon as I said 'I'm really not feeling right in my body. All these things aren't right', it was like, oh, that's okay. It set something right in my brain where I felt like, 'Okay, now I can push on and become who I'm supposed to become'.'
Lorde picks through her sentences slowly, often absent-mindedly spinning the ring on her finger that's stamped with the letter 'E'. Despite the intensity of the subject matter, she's quick to laugh – at one point early in our chat she ducks outside to fondly scold her security guard for talking too loudly ('he's been with me 10 years, that's how we talk to each other'). Dressed in simple black pants and a grey button-up, she's relaxed as we pick through the pieces of the last few years.
Writing for Virgin stretches back a few years, but the ball started rolling in 2023 when she jumped into a New York studio with producer and writer Jim-E Stack. Her last two records – 2017's masterpiece Melodrama, and 2021's delicate and under-performing Solar Power – had been created with ubiquitous pop wizard Jack Antonoff; Lorde said recently it was just time to shake things up and move ahead.
Where Solar Power was ornate and breezy, Virgin is abrasive and direct. In the songwriting and the production, Lorde was gripped by an obsession to peel back the layers, to be as raw and truthful as possible, even when it felt unbearable. 'It was an effort to get to this extreme plainness,' she says. 'And just let what was happening be what made it beautiful. I was reading a lot of [French writer] Annie Ernaux… she's unsentimental. I was interested in female voices that were unsentimental while still being incredibly emotive and generous and loving.
'Once I started writing like that, it started feeling like a Virgin song,' she says. 'In the production, I had this thing where I kept saying, 'I want to see the wires'. My music has always been machine-made. I've always used synths and programmed drums, but I wanted to feel the machines for what they were, not trying to make them sound softer than they are. I was like, 'the machines are the machines and the bodies are the bodies'.'
There's a lot of body on this album, from the slaps of percussion that sound like skin on skin, to visuals of bodily fluids and masturbation, to the beats that underscore songs like Shapeshifter that sound like eerie thumps of a heart. 'I tried hard to bypass my brain and get at the physicality of a song, and the percussion and rhythmic language is a great way of doing that,' Lorde says. 'The whole album to me is about being very close to, or inside, the body.'
Lorde came off birth control in 2023, which pitched her headlong into surges of emotional highs and lows. 'I've always had acne, but all of a sudden I had capital A acne,' she recalls. 'There's something about your vulnerability being so externalised. You have no choice but to be who you are because there's no hiding the violent processes happening inside your body.'
She also felt, for the first time, a broadening of her gender identity, something which is flagged on the album's opening track, Hammer: 'Some days I'm a woman/Some days I'm a man'. Man of the Year explores this more deeply, and the accompanying video sees Lorde roughly taping down her breasts with duct tape.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Lorde recalled fellow pop star Chappell Roan asking her bluntly, 'So are you nonbinary now?' . When I mention this, Lorde throws her head back and laughs. 'Okay, I might've misquoted her there,' Lorde clarifies. 'I think she said, 'Are you changing your pronouns?''
Lorde still uses she/her pronouns and identifies as a cis woman, but she's comfortable in her fluidity. She also stresses, earnestly, that while she feels a little scared about discussing it, it's 'not even a fraction, a hair, of what trans kids go through'.
'It's such a mirror,' she says, about the public's reaction. 'I know that with things like gender it can be a lifelong journey, but I know who I am right now and so I feel quite clear… I think depending on how you feel about uncertainty or impermanence or just any movement pertaining to gender or any widening pertaining to gender, I think it's on you.'
In many ways, Virgin feels like the spiritual successor to Melodrama – an album that was also defined by wild emotion. Featuring some of Lorde's biggest and best songs, like Green Light and the heart-cracking Liability, it's a beloved cult favourite among pop fans. 'It's such a unique relationship,' Lorde says after a time, when I ask what she feels about the intense relationship fans have with her music, and whether it's ever restrictive.
'I feel so lucky to have the degree of emotional buy-in that people have to my work, and I take it so seriously,' she continues. 'I also at times need to turn away from that to make things. I think it's an [painter] Agnes Martin thing where she says, 'I make with my back to the world'.
'Also, and I've certainly had this experience as a fan, sometimes you don't know what you need, and then it happens. There might be a period of disconnect, confusion… but I think in choosing someone, it's a bit like a relationship. You choose to go on this journey in your lives together and sort of be with the zigs and zags.'
She's always enriched by fan interactions, she adds. 'No one is 'sort of' a fan of me. It's like you've got a tattoo, or you don't know who I am. I just hold these kids and they are in my arms, like last night, and I feel them breathing or sobbing. It's indescribably precious to me.'
There's another recent, key inspiration for Lorde: Charli XCX's lurid and ground-breaking album Brat. For Lorde, watching an artist who has traversed the mainstream and the underground finally bring it all together and arrive at a fully realised artistic statement was incredible. The attention to detail, the dedication to vision, pushed Lorde and gave her faith that there would be an appetite for her own examination of femininity.
Then there was Girl, So Confusing, the song in which Charli had questioned her friendship with a fellow artist 'with the same hair' (that is, Lorde). Charli gave Lorde the heads-up about the song by sending her a voice memo, and soon after Lorde recorded a verse for the remix, reflecting on her part in their friendship – and also opening up about being 'at war in my body'. It was, arguably, the biggest pop moment of the year, and a stunning moment of generosity from both artists.
'Charli was like, 'This is going to be massive',' Lorde says now, chuckling, after politely asking her publicist if we could have some more time to chat. 'For me, before it had even come out, what had been achieved between the two of us was so profound. She had opened the channel for this dialogue to happen, and I had to be like, 'Okay, deep breath, be brave, be vulnerable. Give her that part of you'.'
Lorde describes Virgin as having the colour of 'clear'. It's immediately evident in the album cover – an X-ray of Lorde's pelvis that shows a zipper, belt-buckle, and a small IUD floating in ice blue.
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'I was just coming off birth control… The pregnancy test made a reemergence in my life – another kind of intimate technology,' Lorde says. 'I had some health stuff going on and I was getting ultrasounds and I just had this feeling that ultrasounds and X-rays… It felt like an image that I hadn't seen. I truly just did want to see myself all the way. Like, what's at the root?'
She pauses for a moment. 'I'm not even allowed to say where we took the X-rays because it's very illegal to take recreational X-rays in most countries,' she laughs, as her publicist knocks gently on the door again. 'But we took these images of my whole body and I was like, 'I think that's it'. It's me at this exact stage of life, this deep purity, my genes, and my IUD. I was like, 'I think that's who made this album.''