Latest news with #Melodrama
NZ Herald
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Lorde teases Auckland fans with potential surprise gig tonight
Lorde's hometown fans are on high alert after the singer hinted at an impromptu performance taking place in Tamaki Makaurau tonight. Just after 1pm New Zealand time, the Melodrama singer — born Ella Yelich O'Connor — posted a cryptic photo to her Instagram story showing the top right of
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Everything We Know About Lorde's ‘Virgin' So Far
This summer, Lorde will finally deliver what fans are sure is going to be an immaculate conception: Virgin, her long-awaited fourth studio album. More from Billboard YoungBoy Never Broke Again Announces 2025 MASA Tour: See the Dates Wolf Alice Returns With Bold New Single 'Bloom Baby Bloom,' Announces Fourth Album Lorde Watched Pamela Anderson & Tommy Lee's Sex Tape After a Psychedelic Trip: 'I Found It to Be So Beautiful' As revealed April 30, the New Zealander's next LP is set to arrive soon via Universal Music New Zealand and Republic Records, bringing an end to a four-year album drought during which Lorde has spent much of her time out of the spotlight. Finally reemerging shortly prior to the announcement, the hitmaker shared the first taste of what Virgin will sound like on April 24 by releasing lead single 'What Was That,' a synth-pop dance track that catches fans up to speed on what they missed since they last heard from her (lots of MDMA and dancing at New York City nightclub Baby's All Right, it would seem). The track was accompanied by a DIY music video, featuring footage of the star performing it in front of a swarm of fans gathered at Washington Square Park — hours after many of them had been kicked out by authorities when the size of her crowd became too disruptive. The numbers she pulled that day made it clear: Lorde was back. It was a resurrection that her disciples had been waiting for since her last album, Solar Power, dropped in 2021, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard 200. The soft, summery album followed 2017's Melodrama and 2013's Pure Heroine — and with fans knowing full well how different each of those three albums is, it only mades the anticipation surrounding Virgin greater. What will it sound like? What are the songs about? Will there be any collaborations? And while many of those questions won't be answered until the release date, Billboard is keeping track of everything we learn about the LP in the weeks before it drops. Keep reading to see what there is to know about Lorde's Virgin — from the day it's coming out to the producers behind it and more — below. As revealed by Lorde the day she announced Virgin, the album will arrive June 27. In a note posted to her website when she announced Virgin, Lorde revealed that the project was produced with Jim-E Stack, Fabiana Palladino, Andrew Aged, Buddy Ross, Dan Nigro and Dev Hynes of Blood Orange. Later, she'd reveal that both Stack and Hynes would also be joining her as supporting acts on her Ultrasound Tour in support of the album. Virgin marks a departure from Lorde's usual collaborator, Jack Antonoff, who worked on her previous two albums: Melodrama and Solar Power. Of parting ways with the Bleachers frontman, whom she called a 'positive, supportive collaborator,' she said in her May Rolling Stone cover story, 'I just have to trust when my intuition says to keep moving.' Lorde's debut album, Pure Heroine, was produced by Joel Little. In debuting the Virgin cover, Lorde unveiled what is arguably her most daring album artwork yet. Tinted blue, the photo is an X-ray of a woman's pelvis, showing her spine, hip bones and IUD installed in her uterus. It's also the singer's first album cover that does not feature her face since Pure Heroine. After it dropped, fans praised her for picking such a 'weird' and 'intriguing' image to represent the music, with one listener writing on X, 'Lorde's new album being a transparent view of her femininity and the title being a societal construct tied to womanhood and the album cover being an Xray of a woman's reproductive organs while she's clothed … oh the symbolism.' In a statement about the album, Lorde teased that — similar to 'What Was That' — Virgin would be an unflinching look at her life and herself over the past few years. 'THE COLOUR OF THE ALBUM IS CLEAR,' she wrote. 'LIKE BATHWATER, WINDOWS, ICE, SPIT. FULL TRANSPARENCY. THE LANGUAGE IS PLAIN AND UNSENTIMENTAL. THE SOUNDS ARE THE SAME WHEREVER POSSIBLE. I WAS TRYING TO SEE MYSELF, ALL THE WAY THROUGH. I WAS TRYING TO MAKE A DOCUMENT THAT REFLECTED MY FEMININITY: RAW, PRIMAL, INNOCENT, ELEGANT, OPENHEARTED, SPIRITUAL, MASC.' The singer added that the project was '100% WRITTEN IN BLOOD.' In an interview with BBC Radio 1, Lorde revealed that her 'Girl, So Confusing' remix collaborator, Charli xcx, motivated her to step up her game on Virgin by releasing such a game-changing album with Brat. 'It forced me to further define what I was doing, because Charli had so masterfully defined everything about Brat, and I knew that what I was doing was very distinct to that,' Lorde said. 'It's an amazing thing when a peer throws the gauntlet down like that, you're like, 'OK, I've got to pick it up.' I've spoken to a lot of peers who've all had the same feeling.' In an interview with Document Journal ahead of Virgin's release, Lorde got candid about struggling with body image and disordered eating around the time she started writing the album. 'I had made my body very small, because I thought that that was what you did as a woman and a woman on display,' she told the publication, emphasizing that under-eating only had the effect of making her feel 'weak.' 'It was like, 'I'm not going to put anything out until I'm in my body the way I know I'm supposed to be, to be able to do my work,'' she continued. 'That's all I did the last four years, basically. This album is a byproduct of that process of fully coming into my body and feeling the fullness of my power.' After she started to recover from her struggles with disordered eating, Lorde says she was able to really recognize the fluidity of her gender for the first time. To Rolling Stone, she shared that the topic is prevalent throughout Virgin, especially on its opening track and a song titled 'Man of the Year.' The former features the lyric, 'Some days I'm a woman/ Some days I'm a man,' while the latter was written after the singer put duct tape over her chest in a moment of trying to find a look 'that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment.' '[Chappell Roan] asked me this,' Lorde told the publication when asked how she identifies now. '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.' According to Lorde, the lyrics on Virgin are blunt, visceral and discuss bodily truths in a way that's 'right on the edge of gross.' '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 told Rolling Stone. '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.' Rooting the album in her own physicality stemmed not just from her eating disorder recovery and gender fluidity, but also from quitting birth control pills, getting an IUD (as seen in the Virgin cover art) and reading books on pregnancy as she was crafting the record. To match the unflinching nature of the writing, Rolling Stone reports that she created sounds that were 'percussive and prioritized rhythm,' designed 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 added of the project's lyricism. '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.'' Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lorde Says Her New Era Will Change Everything: ‘This Is Gonna Be Crazy, You Have No Idea'
Before Lorde returned with Solar Power in 2021, she launched a newsletter to keep fans up to date with what was going on in her life at the time and how it was inspiring the music she was creating to follow up her opus Melodrama. Recently, the musician has been checking in again as she prepares for the launch of her fourth album. Only this time, she's supplementing her newsletter with a texting service that connects her directly to her fans and allows them to respond as though they had her actual number. 'I just wanted to say hi because everything is about to change and these are really the last moments where it's just us, which is crazy but so right,' Lorde said in her first message to them earlier this week. '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 gonna be crazy, you have no idea.' More from Rolling Stone Lorde Really Likes This Fancy Water Bottle Lorde Has Some New Music She'd Like to Share Dua Lipa Continues Cover Series in New Zealand With Luxury Lorde Hit 'Royals' Talk about giving new meaning to her 'Girl, So Confusing' remix verse, where she sings: 'Well, honestly, I was speechless when I woke up to your voice note.' She performed the remix with Charli XCX at Coachella, making a surprise appearance during the Brat musician's set. 'I could feel it behind me and I was walking out over to the stage at dusk, thinking about all the Coachellas that I've been at across 12 years and just thinking about how it's this thing that can really make you lose yourself,' Lorde said. It's so crazy and it's all these people around. But I felt so real and so solid. I can just feel all that I have kind of shed to be able to be in this the way I am right now. I was like, 'It's dusk in the desert. Fucking enjoy it, bitch.'' Lorde is basking in the freedom that comes with having lifted a weight off her shoulders. Last week, she previewed her forthcoming album on TikTok with a snippet from what is believed to be the first single. 'It was cool going into it having this little taste out, this 15 seconds,' she said about her appearance at Coachella, knowing this little moment of music is out in the world. On the song, she sings: 'Since I was 17/I gave you everything/Now we wake from a dream/Well baby, what was that?' (On Wednesday, she revealed the name of her upcoming new single, 'What Was That,' and wrote that it will be 'out soon' along with sharing a pre-save link.) Even the off-the-cuff TikTok, which finds her filming herself while strutting through New York's Washington Square Park, aligns with her weightless approach to this new era. She isn't abandoning her newsletter now that she has the messaging thread, but there's less overthinking involved in shooting off a quick text or voice note. 'I'm in the zone, not wanting to think too hard about how to communicate,' Lorde said. 'I don't want to be stressing about capturing the moment with the right language. What if it's just about saying it, maybe getting it wrong, and that being okay?' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lorde Unleashes New Era With Hypnotic Synth-Pop Stunner ‘What Was That'
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways Lorde at Paris Fashion Week in 2024 - Credit:Get ready, Lorde season is here. The singer-songwriter has returned with 'What Was That,' a hypnotic, synth-pop number that harkens back to her Melodrama era. On the track, Lorde is haunted by distant, yet vivid memories. 'MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up/ We kissed for hours straight/ Well baby, what was that?' Lorde sings, making every consonant sound like a confession. Along with the new song, the singer shared a flashy visual where she walks alone throughout New York before finally dancing in the center of Washington Square Park, wearing jeans and a bikini top under a white shirt as fans record her with their phones. The video was shot in the city on Tuesday following a momentous meet-up in the park that was shut down by the NYPD. Earlier in the day, chaos ensued when Lorde asked her fans to 'meet [her] at the park.' Despite the cryptic message, many fans figured out where to find the singer and showed up in droves, forcing Lorde to initially cancel her appearance. Lorde finally made it to the park later on in the night, where she danced along to 'What Was That' as it played in front of a crowd of onlookers. More from Rolling Stone Hours before releasing the track, Lorde shared a voice note with fans where she reacted to the the meet-up. 'Holy fuck, that was insane,' the singer started, 'I cannot believe you shut down the fucking park.' She continued, 'I saw this thing that was like 'does Lorde not know she's famous?' I feel like I figured it out last night.' After the ordeal, Lorde shared a teaser video where a close-up shot finds the singer breathless, with New York behind her. Following the pop-up event, fans online began splicing together audio from videos posted online and creating a make-shift version of the track. It's been nearly four years since Lorde released her third studio album, Solar Power. The singer began teasing her return earlier this month when she wiped her website and social media profiles clean. Shortly after, she shared a 15-second clip of 'What Was That' in her first-ever TikTok video. Last week, Lorde detailed her new era in her first voice note to fans. The singer didn't detail much about a potential forthcoming album, but her excitement was palpable in the message. 'This is gonna be crazy,' she said, 'You have no idea.' Lorde shared similar sentiments in her new voice note before the release of 'What Was That.' 'I've never felt more intentional with every single piece of what I'm doing,' she said, adding, 'There's such a deep ethos behind all of it, and it all braids together in the end.' The singer also called the single 'one of my favorite songs I've ever written,' before explaining its importance: 'I really think this song is the music of my rebirth.' Best of Rolling Stone Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lorde Announces Fourth Album, ‘Virgin'
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways Lorde - Credit: Thistle Brown* After another four-year wait, Lorde is back with a new album. She announced Virgin, out June 27, on social media. In a text blast to her fans, Lorde shared the credits for the album. It was produced by her and Jim-E Stack with contributions from Dev Hynes, Daniel Nigro, Fabiana Palladino, Andrew Aged, and Buddy Ross. '100% written in blood,' she added. The album cover looks to be an x-ray of a pelvis, with a visible belt buckle and IUD in the blue tint. More from Rolling Stone Lorde kicked off this era with a bang when she previewed her new song 'What Was That' in Washington Square Park last week. She had announced a fan event via text blast, and by the designated start time of 7 p.m., so many people had filled up the park that the police came and shut the whole thing down. She performed the song a couple of hours later for the part of the crowd who stuck around. The event ended up being a scene in the music video, which came out two days later. Over the weekend, 'What Was That' topped the Spotify U.S. charts, her first song to do so since 'Royals,' from 2012. In a voice note she shared with her fans before releasing 'What Was That,' Lorde teased how she feels about her new era. 'I've never felt more intentional with every single piece of what I'm doing,' she said. 'There's such a deep ethos behind all of it, and it all braids together in the end.' The singer also called the single 'one of my favorite songs I've ever written,' before explaining its importance: 'I really think this song is the music of my rebirth.' The new album follows her 2021 release, Solar Power. She described the album as her 'weed album' and co-produced it with Jack Antonoff (who worked with her on 2017's Melodrama) and Malay. Outside of touring Solar Power, Lorde has popped up to release new music very rarely. She covered the Talking Heads' cover of Al Green's 'Take Me to the River' for a Stop Making Sense tribute album and appeared on the remix of Charli XCX's Brat track 'Girl, so confusing.' Best of Rolling Stone Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
