Latest news with #EllaYelich-O'Connor
The Spinoff
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
A ranking of all 46 Lorde songs
If you love Solar Power, this ranking is probably not for you. Lorde's new album is coming out next month, teased with the singles 'What Was That' and 'Man of the Year'. The first one sounds OK, the second one we'll get to in time. Having a new album on the horizon has pushed me to finish what I've been meaning to write for years: a full ranking of Lorde's songs from worst to best, which I want to get in before we have nine new songs to contend with. Much as New Zealanders always worry about the propriety of dunking on our internationally famous celebrities, these lists only work when the artist's work varies widely in quality and you're prepared to be rude about it. As a Solar Power hater, I am going to be mean about some of Lorde's clangers. But I only have opinions on her entire discography because I've listened to half of it enough times to memorise lyrics upon lyrics. She's a good artist! We all make dumb art sometimes, and someone has to appoint themselves to sort the wheat from the chaff. To narrow things down, I've only included songs with a writing credit for Ella Yelich-O'Connor; no covers, songs that were written by someone else, or remixes (except one). This is a referendum on both her writing and delivery (with some asides about her videos). If you want to make an irate post about why my ranking is wrong, Bluesky is pretty public so I might see it there. 46. 'Secrets from a Girl (Who's Seen It All)' – Solar Power I like the video for this song, meaning I have unfortunately listened to it more times than it deserves. The detached nature of the lyrics eliminates any emotions one could get from it ('Remember what you thought was grief before you got the call?' could have been good in some sort of present tense), and in the end, the throughline only boils down to 'I'm so wise'. The melody is grating, twee and closes with a bafflingly bad cameo from Robyn to boot. Just awful stuff. 45. 'Meltdown (with Stromae, Pusha T, Q-Tip and HAIM)' 'My name is Lorde and I'm here to say / These hip hoppers rap in a rapping way' is made weirder by it being a part of the Hunger Games soundtrack, which Lorde curated. 44. 'The Path' – Solar Power There are two worlds within Waiheke Island. The rich people who buy up holiday homes and largely leave them empty, and the locals increasingly sleeping in sheds or cars as a result. At the time Lorde was filming her Solar Power music videos at Cactus Bay, a group called Protect Pūtiki was (and still is, I think) opposing a marina development at Kennedy Point, with land protectors spending hours freezing in kayaks and getting assaulted by police. To her credit, Lorde donated to the group and promoted it on Twitter (possibly elsewhere as well). Nevertheless, Kieran McLean was right to call Solar Power a 'Climate of Denial'. Watching the videos, I always wonder if the sounds of the security guards ramming a protector with a motorboat echoed, in any way, to the other side of the motu. This all feels more interesting to talk about than the whiny vocals and dull hopes of 'The Path'. 'If you're looking for a saviour, well, that's not me.' Guess not! 43. 'Fallen Fruit' – Solar Power As surefire a way to clear a party as a hippie girl loudly belting out Kumbaya on a guitar. 42. 'Mood Ring' – Solar Power Let's get this out of the way: Lorde has argued that Solar Power is meant to be satirical, not an earnest representation of herself. But self-satire (as opposed to self-deprecation) is hard to do well, and the album isn't witty or cutting enough for the satire to be particularly evident. Even if Lorde feels uncomfortable about rich white women and their foibles, the power that comes with being one can't just be handwaved or self-deprecated away. Like a live-in landlord who 'doesn't want there to be a power dynamic', she's trying to act like one of us while retaining the material trappings that unite her with them. This hits worst on 'Mood Ring'; that 'Let's fly somewhere Eastern' musical bit is dire. 41. 'No Better' – Pure Heroine (Extended) Too right it isn't! 40. 'Dominoes' – Solar Power Fine, I think? I forgot how it went while I was listening to it. It's a song off Solar Power, is what I'm saying. 39. 'Stoned at the Nail Salon' – Solar Power The chorus sounds melodically like the superior 'Wild At Heart' by Lana Del Rey, which in turn borrows from Lana's towering perfection of ' Hope Is A Dangerous Thing '. Go listen to that instead! 38. 'The Man with the Axe' – Solar Power The music in the Spotify ads is more compelling than this album. 37. 'California' – Solar Power There are interesting songs about struggling with fame; this isn't one of them. 36. 'Hold No Grudge' – Solar Power A retrospective on heartbreak years after the dust has settled, with slivers of embarrassment and wonder at your own past feelings, and a little regret that you don't feel deeply about it now. Finally, she's written lyrics that properly fit the sparse musical feeling of Solar Power, but the music is still a bit average. 35. 'Helen of Troy' – Solar Power extended version 'The city's fallin' for me just like I'm Helen of Troy' girl shut up. 34. 'Yellow Flicker Beat' – The Hunger Games soundtrack 'I am newly famous and also an introvert.' 33. 'Still Sane' – Pure Heroine Pure Heroine's most skippable track. 32. 'Million Dollar Bills' – The Love Club EP I respect the musical weirdness of the beat, but I don't necessarily want to listen to it a lot. 31. 'Liability (Reprise)' – Melodrama This only ranks low because it's inherently slight; it's good as a pause between 'Supercut' and 'Perfect Places' and doesn't need to be anything more. 30. 'Biting Down' – The Love Club EP My initial notes were 'Chomp chomp', while waiting for the rest of the song to kick in so I could say something else. It's an OK track but feels like it had more potential. 29. 'Leader of a New Regime' – Solar Power This endears itself to me by sounding slightly like a downbeat Of Montreal song (like this one). It'd be better if she'd paired it, as they do, with some exuberant, energetic songs (like this one). 28. 'Bravado' – The Love Club EP I'm biased towards songs in B Minor, the saddest key, but you can tell this is a song from an early EP. 27. 'Solar Power' – Solar Power This one was OK as a single, at least before commercial overplay; I do remember listening to it and thinking good for you mate, nice that you're feeling a bit better. Sadly, it didn't have enough energy to capture the joy or bliss she (or the character she was playing? whatever) seemed to be feeling, and came off as detached. 26. 'Oceanic Feeling' – Solar Power Pretty and peaceful, like floating in a quiet body of water. 'Breathe out, tune in' is corny though – stop yelling at me to relax, hot yoga teacher Lorde! 25. 'Sober II (Melodrama)' – Melodrama 'Loveless' sounded a bit more upbeat, maybe the maudlin grieving was on its way out? Hell no, it's back baby, and I mean that as a compliment. Grief is annoying and repetitive, and this captures the feeling of cleaning up the champagne glasses, nursing a headache and aware of how stupid the argument you're having is but needing to see it through. It's limited by being just a reprise, but I'm not mad at it. 24. 'A World Alone' – Pure Heroine Fine as an album closer, but ultimately just a lesser imitation of 'Ribs'. 23. 'Big Star' – Solar Power This song is the only one from Solar Power I slightly sing along to and would consider learning how to play. Unfortunately, it gets lost in the endless noodling of soft guitar music and low emotional stakes of the album, and it makes the grief over a dead dog feel sort of ambient. It's decent but I want more from it. 22. 'The Love Club' – The Love Club EP The main song off her EP I repeatedly listened to (outside of 'Royals'); nothing spectacular but it's light and sweet and knowing. 21. 'White Teeth Teens' – Pure Heroine It's a decent song, with a certain quiet anger. It would be better surrounded by different songs to make it feel more cohesive, but there's something aching about the vocals throughout which works well. 20. 'Glory and Gore' – Pure Heroine Musically this song is very listenable. Lyrically paired with the music…it feels like someone putting on a play about bloodlust more than the real thing. Maybe it's supposed to? Whatever, I still like it. 19. 'Perfect Places' – Melodrama As a single, 'Perfect Places' sounds like easily digestible pap that a politician could claim as their favourite song. As an album closer, it's transformed, providing not a perfect resolution but the beginnings of dawn after the hectic and emotional night out of Melodrama. 18. 'Homemade Dynamite' – Melodrama This has a certain soaring quality to it and the intro sounds sinister, which is cool. But I always remain quite aware that this is a song someone has written and recorded; I can't lose myself in it. 17. 'Team' – Pure Heroine Maybe it's the name, but this song does sometimes make me feel like I'm getting told to throw my hands up in the air, which – as she says! – dulls my enthusiasm for it. It's still pretty singable though. 16. 'Writer in the Dark' – Melodrama This one gained a reputation for Lorde shushing everyone at her concerts for singing along with her, but it's a good song! She should've recorded it a cappella, like Tracy Chapman's 'Behind The Wall'; it works best as an unadorned solo line and I can see why she wants to perform it that way. 15. 'What Was That' – Virgin This feels like an echo of Melodrama, which gives one a sense of unease – does Lorde think we only like her when she's taking a scalpel to her insides? Nevertheless, like Melodrama it sounds good and has a pulsating urgency. 14. 'Magnets' (with Disclosure) This one is inseparable from one of the best videos she's ever done, a tiny narrative about affairs and domestic violence revenge plots. The song is a bop too. 13. 'Hard Feelings/Loveless' – Melodrama 'Hard Feelings' is so glum (complimentary). I like how she alternates between barely choking the words out and confessing things in a rapid stream so the other person doesn't have time to interject before you say your full piece. 'Loveless' is fine as its other half, lightly angry. 12. 'Tennis Court' – Pure Heroine The video is fun, and even though the lyrics don't touch on it directly, this song feels like Lorde reacting to the sudden fame brought on by 'Royals'. It's also fun to watch her start a chorus meditating on teen archetypes and let it devolve into 'Let's go down to the tennis court, and talk it up like yeah'. Only teenagers have those stirrings of analysis combined with incoherence! 11. 'Ribs' – Pure Heroine I have to be honest, I like 'Ribs' well enough, but as critic Anthony Fantano said, some of the lyrics on Pure Heroine felt a bit limited topically because of Lorde's age, and 'Ribs' does this musically as well. It feels like nostalgia and longing specifically designed for teenagers, and at age 35 it's not for me. It's still good! We've just got better songs to come. 10. 'Green Light' – Melodrama From the moment the piano slams down, we know something's wrong; we're not exactly here to have a bad time, but Lorde has plainly been riddled with angst and needs to vomit it out. At its best, Melodrama wrestles with the tension of how breakups have a misery and yet a heightened energy, the passion of having loved someone even if it went wrong. I don't know that she fully does want that green light, because staying in that pain seems like a way to hold onto the love. 9. 'Man of the Year' – Virgin Lorde said this is the song she's proudest of off Virgin, and deservedly so. She has merged the stripped back sound of Solar Power with the synthy angst of Melodrama, and in this song it's paying off big-time. The main reasons I haven't ranked it higher are mostly because I find the double-tracking vocals slightly grating and because it turns out 'repeat listenability' was an unconscious criterion for my list, and I'm not always in the mood to have my heart ripped out. Lorde says she's cis but 'in the middle gender-wise', which I can relate to as a femme-of-centre person of woman experience whose gender moves around a lot. Cisness and transness are states of being more than rigid identities, exemplified by the shifts she describes ('I'm a woman except for the days when I'm a man'). Temporary dysphoria isn't as hard as the persistent kind, but it's also quite annoying because – since even DIY trans healthcare pioneers haven't invented shape-shifting yet – it means you can't really take any concrete actions about it, or even fully desire them. You could cut your hair short or get top surgery if you know you might want your hair or tits back again in five years, but not when you know you'll probably want them back in two weeks. Does Lorde relate to what I'm saying? Who knows! She got me to write some stuff about gender! There are times of my life when 'Man of the Yea r' and its video, which may beat out 'Magnets', would've made me sob uncontrollably. It makes me want to ask Lorde if she's watched I Saw The TV Glow yet. She's back! 8. '400 Lux' – Pure Heroine She wrote this at age 17, but feeling ennui that's relieved by going out for a drive in your shitty suburban town with someone you love feels universal. I also love that skidding synth in the chorus. Lovely, sweet song. 7. The 'Girl, So Confusing' Remix (with Charli XCX) When I was 24, a friend texted to apologise for loosely standing me up the previous week. Unused to proactive apologies from men, I cautiously replied that yes, it had hurt my feelings. He wrote back, 'All things aside, I value this friendship and clearly I need to put some effort in myself and send it your way. Coffee next week?' The reason I remember almost the exact wording a decade later is because it literally changed my life and helped me become a stronger person. This song and Lorde's verse is that unexpected relief – oh shit, you do care about me, I'm not a burden? – writ large, combined with pain and anger at a misogynist culture and industry. 6. 'Royals' – Pure Heroine The original article about how racist this song is felt exhaustingly Tumblrite, but it was kind of vindicated when Lorde (as I recall) said in an interview that she was using hip hop beats to critique the genre. We say dumb stuff as teens, but I hated seeing the Labour Party use this song in their campaign, and I wish Lorde would make Winz take it off their hold music playlist. Listening purely to the music, however, it's easy to see why 'Royals' was Lorde's breakout hit. The sparse beat, the crescendos and soaring of the chorus, the bemusement at watching plutocrat consumption patterns, it all still feels as compelling and fresh as when she recorded it. 5. 'Sober' – Melodrama This song starts tense and never lets up its sense of dread, except for a brief loosening in the bridge, perfectly capturing the drunk haziness of thinking that hooking up with your ex again is a good idea. A perfect follower to 'Green Light', reaffirming that we're not here to relax. 4. 'Buzzcut Season' – Pure Heroine This is what Lorde does best: songs that feel wide open and full of possibility and poignance, but also like an ordinary experience you might have with your friends. 3. 'Liability' – Melodrama Using Pachelbel's Canon as a base tune allows some of Lorde's best lyrics to shine through on this track. It's also a perfect comedown after 'The Louvre', the mournfulness of sitting in a dark room and letting your heartbreak permeate your entire, disgusted sense of self; not only am I unlovable, but my friends probably all hate me too. And in Lorde's case, this includes her sense of self as a public figure and product – remember all the 'oh my god, how is she only 17 she's practically a savant' gushing of the early 2010s? The second verse burns an audience who dehumanised her as a genius anomaly among teenage girls. Much of the backlash to Solar Power was because of how unrelatable the themes were to her working-class fans. But one night this very week I was sitting in a deserted carpark having a crying meltdown after a fight with a loved one, and 'Liability' came into my head. Thank u, Lorde. 2. 'Supercut' – Melodrama The music builds perfectly from sparse laments to a banger, the theme is relatable in a particularly vulnerable place, the energy of the song captures both the joy and the pain of toxic nostalgia. Perfect pop tune. 1. 'The Louvre' – Melodrama After looking up 'The Louvre', I feel like I may have misread it for years, interpreting it as about inexorably going back for breakup sex and breakup emotions, when as written it's more about the first obsessive stages of a crush. But all throughout 'Homemade Dynamite', I'm waiting for those opening chords of 'The Louvre' to start. The music swells and pulsates and feels open and expansive but never quite releases the tension; the spoken-word bit shouldn't work but somehow completely does. 'Blow all my friendships to sit in hell with you' at once feels startlingly original and deeply familiar. Can you hear the violence? So far, 'The Louvre' is Lorde's best song.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lorde: ‘I'm an Intense Bitch'
On an unusually freezing April day in New York, the wind rustles through the cracks of a window AC unit in an apartment high above the streets of the West Village. It's an unpretentious two-bedroom, and with its taupes and earthy browns, it feels homey and lived-in. There's a pack of opened Marlboro Golds and loose cash by the door, Post-its stuck to the refrigerator, melted candle wax and magazines on the coffee table, tall branches in a vase, the smell of freshly burned palo santo in the air. The wall next to the fireplace is filled with rows and rows of books, with space on each shelf reserved for more. Even 10 floors up, you can hear chatter from the streets below. Given that she recently cleared her social media to tease the dawn of a brand-new era, some of that talk may well be about the apartment's occupant herself, Ella Yelich-O'Connor, known to the world as Lorde. More from Rolling Stone Lorde Says She's 'In the Middle Gender-Wise': 'I'm a Woman Except When I'm a Man' Lorde Reveals Past Struggle With Eating Disorder: 'I Felt So Hungry and So Weak' Lorde Was Surprised When 'Ribs' Returned to the Charts: 'It's Crazy That It Works on People Still' It was here that she read, partied, and let the dishes pile up while writing songs for Virgin, her first album in four years, out June 27. Recently, she hosted a party for her 28th birthday here. Sometimes, she'll have sleepovers with her younger sister, Indy Yelich, who's 26 and also a singer-songwriter. Indy lives close by and drags her older sibling to CorePower Yoga, dive bars, and Knicks games. Lorde has been making a habit of embracing the things that make her feel her age, and sometimes even younger. 'I don't think I'd smoked a cigarette in a decade,' she says, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a gray T-shirt and dark jeans. 'All of a sudden I was like, 'Should I just try it?' Felt like what a teenager does.' For her last album, 2021's Solar Power, Lorde escaped to the tranquility of the most remote regions of her native New Zealand, finding solace in peace and quiet. New York is the polar opposite, and she likes it that way. She has spent chunks of time here since age 16, usually recording or touring, and bought this apartment four years ago, after seeing it over FaceTime. She loves the way the city forces her to be bolder, more external. 'I used to have this feeling of when I go [to the U.S.], when I'm in these spaces, I'm an artist, and then I go home and I'm myself,' she explains. 'And that's crazy. It's not what being an artist is like. You're an artist all day, whatever country you're in. I think building a home here has helped me to see that.' In the four years since Solar Power, Lorde has remained relatively quiet. But in some ways, her presence has never been stronger. Some of the biggest pop hits in recent years were made by singer-songwriters who grew up studying Lorde. When she became a brooding pop phenom with 'Royals,' her minimalist critique of materialism, her sound immediately had a seismic impact. 'I see how the pop landscape has changed since she entered,' says friend and collaborator Dev Hynes. 'I feel like post her success, production has been scaled back into quite a minimalistic place. It's absolutely because of her.' Hynes notes that her vocal style — expressive and intimate, like she's confiding her deepest secrets to a friend — is foundational to a generation of young singers. The young singers agree. 'I think Lorde's voice truly is the voice of a generation,' Olivia Rodrigo says. 'I don't know any modern songwriters who haven't been influenced by her.' A 14-year-old Gracie Abrams saw Lorde perform in L.A. just before Lorde's 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, came out. Now, the pair are friends. '[That show] changed every single part of my life for good,' Abrams says. 'I don't know that I would've found any shred of confidence to get on any stage had I not watched Ella command that room the way she did. I remember thinking, 'This person is from another planet, and I want to live there with her.'' In a city of more than 8 million, Lorde has grown accustomed to daily interactions with people who feel like this; you could say she finds the encounters useful. 'It's made me see myself as I am, because I have a huge problem with being able to feel that I am powerful,' she says. The bigness of her career is harder to ignore when face-to-face with someone who has her lyrics tattooed on their skin. 'Not everyone knows who I am, but I don't really have casual fans,' she says. 'I can't deny that I have done something that has had an effect on these people because they're in front of me. It made everything the right size.' These days, Lorde feels locked in to everyone and everything around her. She metaphorically threw her phone in the ocean while making Solar Power, but she's plugged back in now; tomorrow, she will post her very first TikTok. 'I've never been more addicted to my phone,' she says. 'I think to be a good artist, you have to have a sense of what's in the water. And I'm on my phone way more, but also I've never read more. I've never looked at more art. Maybe it balances out somehow.' And yet, it turns out that getting to this place required a series of dramatic personal upheavals — many of which informed the raw, sublime Virgin. On it, she set out to deconstruct and even destroy the old version of herself. Lead single 'What Was That' describes a young woman clearing the smoke from a recently ended relationship, mourning what she lost but free to start anew. But there's so much more than breakup songs. On Virgin, rebirth is stitched into every line: The album is feral, wild, and physical, full of Lorde's most from-the-gut singing ever. As we talk in her apartment and around her city, Lorde often repeats how 'terrified' she is to open up about the album — and to let the world hear it. There are songs she forebodingly describes as 'rugged,' vulnerable, and messy, fitting for an artist who's unlearning the conditioning that taught her to be digestible and 'good.' 'There's going to be a lot of people who don't think I'm a good girl anymore, a good woman. It's over,' she promises, eyes bright and full of fire. 'It will be over for a lot of people, and then for some people, I will have arrived. I'll be where they always hoped I'd be.' IN SOME WAYS, the story of Virgin starts the night before Lorde released Solar Power. She was in New York, doing press for the album. She was draping herself in sundresses and bright colors. All she remembers feeling then, she says, was thin. But also that she would never feel thin enough. 'I felt so hungry and so weak,' she says. 'I was on TV [that] morning, and I didn't eat because I wanted my tummy to be small in the dress. It was just this sucking of a life force or something.' She was unhealthy — starving herself and obsessing over her size — but not so visibly that it would ring alarm bells for anyone around her. She was consumed with counting calories and monitoring her protein intake, a preoccupation that began during the pandemic. Lorde watched her body get smaller. By the time the North American leg of her Solar Power tour began in April 2022, she still hadn't admitted to herself that she had an eating disorder. Before she embarked on that tour, she set out to fix a different part of her life: the debilitating stage fright she'd grappled with since she was a five-year-old doing community theater. The solution, it turned out, was MDMA and psilocybin therapy, a form of PTSD treatment that researchers are still fighting to get approved by the FDA. Over the course of many sessions between 2022 and 2024, Lorde would take one of the psychedelic drugs and let the euphoria free her body and her mind. 'I was touring without stage fright for the first time,' she says. On the road, she was finally able to walk around cities like Milan and Paris before a show rather than rotting in her hotel room, terrified of having a panic attack and passing out onstage. The songs felt different, too. 'I would play 'Supercut,'' she says, 'and all of a sudden there was a hook around my guts and everyone in the room was having the same feeling, [like] there'd been a huge pressure change. It made me realize how much I love and kind of need that very deep, visceral response to feel my music.' During this time, Lorde wrote in an email newsletter to her 'kids,' as she calls her fans, that touring Solar Power had 'set so much right' inside her. And yet, beneath the surface, the obsession with eating and protein and counting calories remained. 'I don't know how those two things can be true: that I'm having this really amazing, rich experience of playing the shows and meeting these kids, and [yet] I'm also looking at the pictures afterward and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy, thinking it was so unforgivable what I had allowed it to become,' she says. By 2023, Lorde faced still another challenge: Her longest relationship was crumbling. Since around 2015, she had been dating Justin Warren, an executive at Universal Music in New Zealand. They met when Lorde was a teenager signed to the label; Warren is 17 years her senior. They never publicly spoke about their romance, but Warren was often by her side. In an email newsletter she shared with fans after her tour wrapped, she revealed that she was 'living with heartbreak again.' 'I went through a breakup,' she confirms to me. 'It was so painful, as they are, but there was real dignity to it and grace and a lot of respect. It continues to be a relationship that I cherish.' 'There's going to be a lot of people who don't think I'm a good girl any more.' Breaking up took a while. Lorde relocated to London in May of that year for a five-month stay while she was in the thick of it. She looked inward, thinking about the parts of her life that needed to change. 'I had this feeling that I had never been alone,' she says. 'There'd always been someone, not even necessarily a romantic partner. And often that was an older person. I was always choosing someone to be God.' She chalks up that tendency to her career, one that uprooted her when she was a teenager. 'It was a pattern I found myself repeating,' she says. 'I think because of leaving home so young and not quite being ready to be on my own. But I had this very acute sense that I needed to be alone to really meet myself.' Lorde thinks back to when the wound from the breakup was still fresh, how ragged and physical it felt, how weak and sore she became just from crying. Learning to be alone was 'really fucking difficult.' But solitude ended up being a gift. She grew to love sleeping and living alone, lighting a candle next to her bed or drawing a bath for herself. Some nights, she would see friends, while on others she would stay up to read and write and leave pages full of lyrics and stray thoughts all over the floor. One night during her summer in London, she went to Hampstead Heath and laid in the grass with her headphones on. It made her feel like a teen again. Returning to New York at the end of 2023 meant taking stock of what was and wasn't working for her. She was still stuck in a cycle of self-loathing, covering up the mirrors in her home instead of facing herself. She began to realize that her obsession with thinness was controlling her life, that she needed to find a path out of her disordered eating habits. It was the first time she could see a way out. It's still a journey, Lorde says, to return to her old self, to someone who had a healthier relationship with food and with her body. Her return began once she started to see her compulsion to count and track and restrict as a kind of self-imposed mission to keep herself small in various ways. 'Once I stopped doing that, I had all this energy for making stuff,' Lorde tells me. 'I could see that if I cut that cord, maybe I would get something back that I needed to do my work. And it was totally true. Got it all back, and way more.' She continued her psychedelic treatments through 2024. They helped put her squarely in her body, made her appreciate her physical self and what she's capable of. '[I've] been in the same body [my] whole life,' she says, recalling a realization she had during those trips. 'I understood it. I was like, 'These arms climbed the jungle gym. And they held an award on a TV show.' I understood the whole spectrum of it and began to enjoy the complexity and ruggedness.' From there, she experienced what she calls 'the ooze': the act of letting herself take up more space in everything she does, whether physically or creatively. Doing so opened the floodgates of her own identity. 'My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,' she explains. This is something her kids have been picking up on, noticing the more masculine touches to her wardrobe in glimpses they've seen of her this past year. 'The lyrics are right on the edge of gross.' She wants to talk more about it, but not today. In the weeks leading up to the launch of 'What Was That,' Lorde has been filming the song's video with co-director Terrence O'Connor (no relation). Early this morning, the pair was out shooting scenes for her video while the sun was rising and the New York traffic was still light. 'I want to express myself perfectly, and I've had four hours of sleep,' she says. 'I just really want to get it right.' As her true self oozed out, so did Virgin. Lorde woke up on New Year's Day in 2024 declaring that this was going to be an amazing year. Now, she realizes it was her favorite year yet. DOWNSTAIRS FROM LORDE'S apartment, a Sprinter van is waiting to take us to the Bushwick, Brooklyn, studio where she is filming a couple of scenes for her video. When we arrive, we enter into a dark, cavernous space where I see a 14-foot-tall, aboveground cylindrical structure. There's a stunt coordinator waiting for her. The tube, complete with a ladder inside, is meant to act as a stand-in for an underground manhole. As her manager points out to me, it's unbelievably hard to rent out an actual manhole. O'Connor, who has worked closely with Charli XCX and Haim, stands on an aerial lift, his iPhone attached to a long pole that he's sticking into the top of the structure to conduct lighting tests. There are no bulky cameras anywhere on set; they're shooting everything on O'Connor's phone. 'It felt really earnest, like a school project,' Lorde says. 'It looks really primitive. We'll see.… It could totally suck.' Today, in a white button-down, combat boots, and baggy jeans, she'll be climbing up New York City's cleanest sewer; in the video, she'll end up at Manhattan's Washington Square Park for the final scene. After the video is released, many online wonder why it feels so 'low-budget.' Lorde says that's the point: Virgin is about returning to, as she puts it, a 'really essential, pure' version of herself. If the album had a color, she says, it would be 'clear,' referencing a great bit by the comedian Julio Torres about clear being his favorite color. 'That's fixed to this transparency,' she explains. 'There's as little between me and the brand as possible.' From the X-ray of her pelvis on its front cover to the Times New Roman font for the lyrics in the booklet (another school-project kind of touch), each choice is meant to feel naked and direct and youthful. 'I'm excited to find out if these are cool to other people, or really wrong and weird,' Lorde says. Unlike Solar Power and Melodrama, Lorde didn't start writing this new music with an album title or concept in mind. Her goal was physicality, creating sounds that were percussive and prioritized rhythm. She wanted the music to work on the body before the brain. 'This is going to sound crazy, but I said to myself, 'We get it. You're smart. You don't need to telegraph it,'' she explains. 'Whereas in the past, I'm really trying to craft these lyrics. This time I was like, 'No, be smart enough to let it be really basic. Be plain with language and see what happens.'' Lorde made her past two albums with Jack Antonoff, whom she calls a 'positive, supportive collaborator,' but it was time to shake things up. 'I'm very vibes-based,' she says. 'I just have to trust when my intuition says to keep moving.' Her primary collaborator on Virgin was producer and writer Jim-E Stack, who has worked with Bon Iver and Danielle Haim. Lorde reached out to him in early 2022, while she was in Los Angeles rehearsing for the Solar Power tour. They met at Sunset Tower and talked about being Drake fans as teens and life in general. 'I had always seen her as an outlier pop star, this A-tier pop star, who had the success and accolades that came with that but didn't play the game,' Stack says. 'I just admired her tremendously.' During their first sessions together that year, the pair wrote one song that would end up on Virgin, but nothing else was sticking just yet. It was taking her longer than she hoped to figure out what she was trying to make. While in London, she isolated herself outside of her remaining tour dates, simmering in the end of her relationship. She also read, a lot. Of the 60 or so books she shipped from New York to London, most were about the body, specifically pregnancy. The books on motherhood built upon her interests in the female body and the way it can change in all its glory and gore: Angela Garbes' Essential Labor, Sheila Heti's Motherhood, Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight. When she read novels, she turned mostly to writers like Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner — all authors who blend fiction with intense autobiographical honesty, a familiar mode for the singer. She started having 'really amazing dreams,' collecting them in a now-full dream journal. She befriended 'all these amazing older woman artists' who brought her to museums and galleries. She became a fan of Martin Wong, a Chinese American painter whose works explore racial identities and queerness. She says his work 'sliced' her. All the while, she waited for her next album to reveal itself to her: 'Nothing was calling me, [but] I knew it would call.' While in London, she and Charli XCX talked about working on some music together. Lorde's Virgin may not have taken shape quite yet, but Charli's Brat was well on its way. Still, the pair wouldn't make anything in 2023; Lorde always bailed on their plans. 'Unbeknownst to [Charli], I was slamming into rock bottom on multiple levels,' Lorde recalls, referring to her breakup and eating disorder, 'but it was also playing into this dynamic that had really been making her feel a lot of pain.' Charli had no idea what Lorde was struggling with; she felt neglected by a friend she'd been comparing herself to ever since both broke through as artists. Charli poured all of that into 'Girl, So Confusing,' and when she sang, 'People say we're alike/They say we've got the same hair,' both their fandoms connected the dots immediately. Before the song came out, Charli sent Lorde a voice note, giving her a heads-up and explaining her perspective on a friendship that was becoming increasingly fraught. 'I was like, 'Wow, shit, OK,'' Lorde says. 'But very quickly, I totally saw it for what it was: an incredible opportunity for us to have a conversation publicly and privately.' Shortly after, Lorde recorded her own response verse for the song's remix, revealing — to some degree, at least — her private battles and hyping up an artist she has admired for more than a decade. 'I felt honored that she was willing to go there, to be so open and to be so vulnerable,' Charli says of Lorde's verse. 'It's a rare thing. It made me think about the nature of internal dialogues and how sometimes you sort of totally spin out on what's happening in your own brain so much that you kind of forget entirely about the other person's perspective. I learned so much from the collaboration — about bravery, about communication, and about friendship.' When Lorde got back to New York in 2023, she reached back out to Stack. As soon as the pair reentered the studio, they wrote 'What Was That.' It turned into a puzzle they loved piecing together. At one point, in order to get the exact percussive sounds she wanted, Lorde and Stack even ripped the drums off Radiohead's 'Reckoner.' The resulting song was, as she describes, a work of 'Lorde canon' — a quintessential big pop anthem from someone who is notably quite great at making big pop anthems. 'It's a banger,' she says. 'I love making bangers. Someone's got to make them. I'm really proud when they come out of me.' The physicality bleeds through in more than just the beats. Her lyrics on Virgin are vivid and at times grotesque, full of action and fluids and bodily functions. There's spit and mouthwash and ovulation and glimpses of Lorde riding her bike, swallowing MDMA, dragging on a cigarette. 'My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room.' 'I think coming more into my body, I came into an understanding of the grotesque nature of it and the glory and all these things,' she explains. 'It's right on the edge of gross. I often really tried to hit this kind of gnarliness or grossness. 'You tasted my underwear.' I've never heard that in a song, you know? It felt like the right way to tell this whole chapter.' THE DAY AFTER she climbed out of the man-made 'manhole,' Lorde invites me back to her apartment around 9 p.m. She's just come from another shoot — more photos for the album campaign — with her co-creative director Thistle Brown, whom Lorde knew growing up in New Zealand. She lights a candle on her coffee table and wipes the foundation off her face with micellar water. Lorde had been reading her own Wikipedia page recently while in a meeting. There's a quote she had given as a teenager that stuck out to her: 'I have nothing against anyone getting naked.… I just don't think it really would complement my music in any way or help me tell a story any better.' 'That's the evolution right there,' she says. An hour earlier, at the shoot with Brown, she had draped herself over a couch in her underwear. As a teenager, Lorde felt protective of her body and her sexuality. Her clothes acted as a kind of armor: long sleeves, high necks, opaque colors. It was a double-edged sword, though: Lorde debuted around the same time that a generation of teen superstars were starting to grow up. Artists like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez were shedding the purity rings and forced modesty of their Disney careers in order to embrace their bodies and sexual agency. Lorde, by contrast, became a symbol of some type of moral purity, and her modesty was, in essence, used to slut-shame her peers. 'I remember vividly in that first year of being famous, so many people saying — I'm paraphrasing — 'It's so good you don't take your clothes off like these other sluts,'' she says. 'I was up on a pedestal because I wasn't employing the same tools. And I remember being like, 'No, no, I will take my clothes off one day. Be ready.' I've always known that having those qualities ascribed to me so young [meant that] me being more open with my body, with my sexuality, [would] carry real weight and agitate and alienate.' There were expectations placed on Lorde about how a girl becoming a young woman should act. It was another way she made herself small, trying to please the world and be good. But as she oozed, she redefined herself, and she saw that her gender identity could get bigger, too. On Virgin's opening track, she lays the tale of her rebirth bare: 'Some days I'm a woman/Some days I'm a man.' I ask her how she identifies now, what it means and what's changed. '[Chappell Roan] asked me this,' Lorde recalls. The pair have become close friends over the past year. 'She was like, 'So, are you nonbinary now?' And I was like, 'I'm a woman except for the days when I'm a man.' I know that's not a very satisfying answer, but there's a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.' Though Lorde still calls herself a cis woman and her pronouns remain unchanged. She describes herself as 'in the middle gender-wise,' a person more comfortable with the fluidity of her expression. In some ways, she feels like her teenage self again, back when her friends were mostly boys and there was a looseness in how she dressed and acted. In 2023, she went shopping at clothing store C'H'C'M' and tried on a pair of men's jeans. She sent a picture to Stack to get his opinion. 'He was like, 'I want to see the you that's in this picture represented in the music.' This was before I had any sense of my gender broadening at all.' Toward the end of that year, she went off birth control for the first time since she was 15. 'I've now come to see [my decision] as maybe some quasi right-wing programming,' she admits, presumably referring to years of far-right influencers pushing anti-contraception disinformation. 'But I hadn't ovulated in 10 years. And when I ovulated for the first time, I cannot describe to you how crazy it was. One of the best drugs I've ever done.' She wrote the album's opening track soon after, as well as 'Man of the Year.' She felt like she had superpowers, like being off birth control had peeled a film off her life. But the 'best drug' came with bigger crashes than she had ever experienced. She would be diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of PMS that causes debilitating mood swings, among other symptoms; she has since inserted the IUD visible on her album cover. The experience opened up an avenue of discovery she hadn't anticipated. 'I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,' she explains. 'It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.' When Lorde wrote 'Man of the Year,' she was sitting on the floor of her living room, trying to visualize a version of herself 'that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment.' What she saw once again was an image of herself in men's jeans, this time wearing nothing else but her gold chain and duct tape on her chest. The tape had this feeling of rawness to her, of it 'not being a permanent solution.' 'I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself,' she tells me. 'I have this picture staring at myself. I was blond [at the time]. It scared me what I saw. I didn't understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.' We talk about the Trump administration's war against the trans community. While opening up about her own identity terrifies her, she knows she has less on the line than people whose gender identity does not match what they were assigned at birth. 'I don't think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,' she says. 'I see these incredibly brave young people, and it's complicated. Making the expression privately is one thing, but I want to make very clear that I'm not trying to take any space from anyone who has more on the line than me. Because I'm, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.' As the candle burns down, Lorde recalls a moment after her second psychedelic therapy session. She found herself searching for the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape. She's not sure why, but she watched the whole thing. 'I was always choosing someone to be god.' 'I found it to be so beautiful. And maybe it's fucked up that I watched it, but I saw two people that were so in love with each other, and there was this purity. They were jumping off this big boat.… They were like children. They were so free. And I just was like, 'Whoa. Being this free comes with danger.'' The consequences of freedom have been on Lorde's mind a lot lately. She's realized the consequences of not taking these risks would be worse. 'It feels worse to keep it all bolted down,' she says. 'But God, of course, I've had many moments in the last couple years where I'm like, 'If I could just have a nice normal life where you don't elicit any strong reactions from anyone.' But that's not my path.' IN LATE APRIL, Lorde shoots the final scene for the 'What Was That' video. The idea is to dance and lip-synch to the single in the center of Washington Square Park's fountain at dusk, surrounded by fans, whom she tipped off via a texting service she's been using to communicate with them. Lorde was genuinely not sure how many people would show up. She had also started to get cold feet about the video being shot on iPhone, 'pre-party jitters' getting the best of her. She decided to cast a wider net for a crowd to join her, posting a shot of the park's fountain on her Instagram story. Within a couple of hours, thousands had showed up — so many that the NYPD shut it down. Lorde was getting ready in her apartment when she got word. Her team and video crew were in panic mode. It seemed like weeks of planning had just come crashing down. On Instagram, she removed her story announcement, then told everyone to disperse, due to orders from the NYPD. But just a few blocks away, Lorde wasn't worried. 'I get very calm in a crisis,' she says. If Virgin, in its clearness, is about keeping the scars visible, then this hiccup fit perfectly in the world she was about to build. 'I was like, 'This is amazing. This is such a good thing.'' In the chaos, she called up Dev Hynes, with whom she regularly walks through the park. He was there already, en route to play soccer with friends, and stopped to play Lorde's new single for the fans while she looked on via FaceTime. Meanwhile, Lorde watched the sunset from her building's rooftop. Sometime after 8:30, dusk had passed and the park had emptied out just enough for Lorde to finally emerge; by then, riot police were on location at the park ('and Counterterrorism, or something,' she says). She and her small crew were able to shoot one, three-minute take in the fountain — and they nailed it. The video was edited that night and posted online just two days later. Virgin came to life. By the weekend, 'What Was That' would become her first Number One song on U.S. Spotify since 'Royals.' When Lorde first moved to New York City, she used to avoid walking through Washington Square Park. With its throngs of young people congregating in all corners, it was a space that forced her to confront the fact that where she lives is no longer separate from where she exists as an artist. Once she let go, she began to embrace the intimate one-to-one conversations with her fans that are part of her everyday life. It was again in the park that she recognized what this was all about: the very pure, clear channel between her and her uncasual listeners. 'I'm kind of an intense bitch,' she says. 'I've connected with the mission to do what only I can do. It's enough.' Production Credits Produced by PARTNER FILMS. Styling by TAYLOR MCNEIL at THE WALL GROUP. Hair by JIMMY PAUL at SUSAN PRICE NYC. Makeup by MAUD LACEPPE at HOME AGENCY. Nails by HONEYNAILZ at EXPOSURE NY using LONDONTOWN KUR VEIL #4. Tailoring by CAROL AI. Set Design by JULIA WAGNER at SECOND NAME AGENCY. Lighting Director JAMES SAKALIAN. Digital Technician NOAH ESPARAS. Video Director BRAD WICKHAM. 1st AC MAR ALFONSO. Camera Operator CHLOE RAMOS. Sound Engineer GABE QUIROGA. Lighting DAVID DJACO. Video Editor RYAN JEFFREY. Colorist OLIVER EID. Color Assistance ADAM RAICKOVICH. Color Producer VERONICA WEBB. VFX EMMA KUMMER. Photographer assistance KATIE TUCKER and CONOR RALPH. Styling Assistance CLAIRE WISEMAN. Set Design assistance MADELEINE PEACOCK and JORDAN MCCOLLOUGH. Photographed at the GIBNEY CENTER AT 890 BROADWAY. { pmcCnx({ settings: { plugins: { pmcAtlasMG: { iabPlcmt: 1, }, pmcCnx: { singleAutoPlay: 'auto' } } }, playerId: "4d2e11b7-633a-417a-962e-4b7e105b5998", mediaId: "e51156ce-a715-454b-9a0c-86f650920b05", }).render("connatix_player_e51156ce-a715-454b-9a0c-86f650920b05_2"); }); Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
NZ Herald
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Listener's Songs of the Week: Yes, that new track by Lorde has made the cut
The Californian hippy-chickness of Lorde's 2021's album Solar Power made it a less involving and enduring affair than its two predecessors. After her magic trick of turning the vividly personal into stadium pop on both breakthrough debut Pure Heroine and its even better big sister Melodrama, Solar Power felt smug, baggy and lightweight. So, it's interesting here to hear Ella Yelich-O'Connor, 28, revisiting her teenage years ('Since I was seventeen, I gave you
Perth Now
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Masses of Lorde fans crash New York park pop-up show
Lorde's New York pop-up has been shut down by police before it began. The New Zealand pop star announced to fans on social media she would be hosting a meet-up at Washington Square Park on Tuesday evening, local time. However, so many fans turned up that police told them to leave. Lorde posted to her Instagram Story: "OMG @thepark the cops are shutting us down. I am truly Amazed by how many of you showed up!!! "But they're telling me you gotta disperse ... I'm so sorry." Fortunately, Lorde managed to play her new song What Was That to the crowd through giant speakers as she danced on top of a table. The lyrics go: "Since I was 17, I gave you everything / Now we wake from a dream / Well baby, what was that?" Lorde recently teased "everything is about to change" as she prepares her new era. After teasing a snippet of her new song in her first TikTok video, Lorde changed her Spotify bio to tease new music dropping on April 25, which we now know is What Was That. The Royals hitmaker also thanked fans personally for their "patience" as they await her first new music since her 2021 LP Solar Power. In a voice note, shared directly to fans on WhatsApp, she shared: "I can feel all that I have shed to be able to be in this the way I am right now. "I just wanted to say hi because everything is about to change. These are really the last moments where it's just us, which is crazy. "It's so right. I'm so ready. I didn't know if I'd ever be able to say that, but I am. I'm so thankful for your patience. I've felt your love, I've felt you right there. This is going to be crazy, you have no idea." The Green Light hitmaker, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O'Connor, posted her first TikTok of her walking through Washington Square Park. Lorde is known for her mysterious social media activity. Just before the TikTok, Lorde wiped her socials clean and changed her profile picture to one of a chrome metal water bottle. Her Instagram bio now reads: "THE THEMES ARE ALWAYS THE SAME— A RETURN TO INNOCENCE— THE MYSTERIES OF THE BLOOD— AN ITCH FOR THE TRANSCENDENTAL."
Perth Now
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Police shut down Lorde's New York park pop-up
Lorde's New York pop-up was shut down by police before it started. The New Zealand pop star announced to fans on social media that she would be hosting a meet-up at Washington Square Park on Tuesday (22.04.25) at 7pm. However, so many fans turned up, the police told them to leave. Lorde posted to her Instagram Story: 'OMG @thepark the cops are shutting us down. I am truly Amazed by how many of you showed up!!! 'But they're telling me you gotta disperse ... I'm so sorry.' Fortunately, Lorde managed to play her new song 'What Was That' to the crowd through giant speakers as she danced on top of a table. The lyrics go: 'Since I was 17, I gave you everything / Now we wake from a dream / Well baby, what was that?' Lorde recently teased "everything is about to change" as she prepares her new era. After teasing a snippet of her new song in her first TikTok video, Lorde changed her Spotify bio to tease new music dropping on April 25, which we now know is 'What Was That'. The 'Royals' hitmaker also thanked fans personally for their "patience" as they await her first new music since her 2021 LP 'Solar Power'. In a voice note, shared directly to fans on WhatsApp, she shared: 'I can feel all that I have shed to be able to be in this the way I am right now. 'I just wanted to say hi because everything is about to change. These are really the last moments where it's just us, which is crazy. 'It's so right. I'm so ready. I didn't know if I'd ever be able to say that, but I am. I'm so thankful for your patience. I've felt your love, I've felt you right there. This is going to be crazy, you have no idea.' The 'Green Light' hitmaker — whose real name is Ella Yelich-O'Connor — posted her first TikTok of her walking through Washington Square Park. Lorde is known for her mysterious social media activity. Just before the TikTok, Lorde wiped her socials clean and changed her profile picture to one of a chrome metal water bottle. Her Instagram bio now reads: 'THE THEMES ARE ALWAYS THE SAME— A RETURN TO INNOCENCE— THE MYSTERIES OF THE BLOOD— AN ITCH FOR THE TRANSCENDENTAL'.
