<\/p>\n
A hot late-summer breeze blows across a Burbank parking lot as Lorde sits beneath a tattered canopy outside the rehearsal studio where she\u2019s preparing for her latest world tour.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old singer and songwriter from New Zealand has been here for 10 days figuring out how to bring her album \u201cVirgin\u201d to the stage; in a few hours, she\u2019ll fly home to New York for a friend\u2019s wedding before heading to Austin, Texas, for the tour\u2019s opening date.<\/p>\n
First, though: one final run-through of the show with the dancers she\u2019s recruited to complement her own movement, which she describes as \u201cquite wild and difficult to corral.\u201d To ready her body, she ordered in Japanese last night, then had somebody administer an IV vitamin drip as she thumbed through an issue of the New Yorker.<\/p>\n
\u201cReal pop-star behavior,\u201d she says with a laugh. \u201cThe IV comes to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born Ella Yelich-O\u2019Connor, Lorde broke out at age 16 with \u201cRoyals,\u201d her stark and whispery debut single \u2014 \u201ca speech barely scaffolded with melody,\u201d she calls it now \u2014 about the illusory satisfactions of a consumer culture run amok. \u201cRoyals\u201d topped Billboard\u2019s Hot 100 for nine straight weeks in 2013 and went on to win two Grammys, including the award for song of the year.<\/p>\n
It also set a template for much of the brooding pop music to come over the next decade from the likes of Billie Eilish<\/a> and Olivia Rodrigo<\/a>, the latter of whom recently told Rolling Stone that she doesn\u2019t know \u201cany modern songwriters who haven\u2019t been influenced by her.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet by 2021\u2019s \u201cSolar Power,<\/a>\u201d Lorde was singing about abandoning the hurly-burly of pop stardom in the always-on social-media era. \u201cI throw my cellular device in the water,\u201d she cooed blissfully in the LP\u2019s strummy title track, \u201cCan you reach me? No, you can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cVirgin,\u201d which came out in June, finds her inching back into the fray. Streaked with harsh if alluring electronic textures Lorde created with her co-producer Jim-E Stack, it\u2019s the work of a woman attempting to make room for her whole self \u2014 her complicated body image, her varied sexual appetites, her evolving gender identity \u2014 within the constricting reality of female celebrity.<\/p>\n Indeed, as she was making the record last year, Lorde had her most scrutinized pop-cultural moment in ages when Charli XCX invited her to appear on a remix of her song \u201cGirl, So Confusing<\/a>.\u201d The original, from Charli\u2019s 2024 \u201cBrat\u201d album, didn\u2019t name Lorde but was widely interpreted as being about the hot-and-cold relationship between the two singers.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very unique feeling to have someone write a song about you,\u201d Lorde says before her dance rehearsal. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019d ever had that before, and I\u2019d written so many songs about other people.\u201d<\/p>\n Dressed in baggy jeans and a billowy linen shirt, she sips a green juice as a takeout bag from Sqirl sits next to her on a picnic table. (\u201cSome sort of macro bowl,\u201d she says of the food.) Her wavy brown hair hangs loose around her face, and she wears a ring embossed with an \u201cE\u201d that her grandmother Elsa gave her when she was young.<\/p>\n \u201cI came to the conclusion that any song that gets written about you is a love song,\u201d she continues. \u201cIt\u2019s an act of love to use your gift to see someone.\u201d<\/p>\n In the \u201cGirl, So Confusing\u201d remix, which exploded immediately online, Lorde tells Charli that the reason she\u2019d always cancel on their plans is because she\u2019d \u201cbeen at war with my body\u201d \u2014 \u201cI tried to starve myself thinner,\u201d she adds \u2014 and was \u201cscared to be in your pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n Why reveal something so personal on someone else\u2019s record? Lorde shrugs. \u201cIt felt like what the moment called for. I was definitely in the soup already,\u201d she says, writing songs for \u201cVirgin\u201d \u2014 \u201cdropping all guard and being radically transparent,\u201d as she puts it. \u201cI just wanted to lay it all very bare.\u201d<\/p>\n Says Stack, who\u2019s also worked with Bon Iver and Gracie Abrams<\/a>: \u201cI think it was a moment where Ella had no choice but to walk the walk.\u201d<\/p>\n Read more:<\/b> Ashlee Simpson blazed a trail. Now she\u2019s seeing where it leads<\/a><\/p>\n Still, the honesty of \u201cGirl, So Confusing\u201d hit Lorde the day after it came out. \u201cI was like, This is pretty \u2026 close<\/i>. But that was a perfect experience for me as an artist,\u201d she says. \u201cIt gave me a lot of faith in the endeavor.\u201d<\/p>\n Affirmed by the reaction to the remix \u2014 she and Charli broke the internet again when they performed the track live at Madison Square Garden and at Coachella \u2014 Lorde burrowed deeper into the uncomfortable truths she wanted to express on \u201cVirgin.\u201d<\/p>\n The album opens with \u201cHammer,\u201d in which she sings, \u201cSome days, I\u2019m a woman \/ Some days, I\u2019m a man\u201d over a strobing synth lick; it\u2019s a theme she revisits in \u201cMan of the Year,\u201d whose music video shows Lorde pulling off a white T-shirt then binding her breasts with strips of duct tape.<\/p>\n In \u201cFavourite Daughter\u201d she contemplates her tricky relationship with her mother, in \u201cBroken Glass\u201d her history with disordered eating; \u201cGRWM\u201d exults in the sexual freedom to be had after the kind of breakup Lorde went through in 2023, when she split from the record-exec boyfriend she\u2019d been with since around 2015.<\/p>\n Asked to name her favorite lyric on the LP, she doesn\u2019t hesitate. \u201c\u2018I rode you till I cried,\u2019\u201d she says, quoting a line from \u201cClearblue,\u201d in which she recalls a pregnancy scare in vivid detail.<\/p>\n \u201cWho else is putting that in a pop song?\u201d she says, grinning.<\/p>\n Sonically, Lorde and Stack sought what she calls a \u201cprimal\u201d energy in the music; she was constantly pushing to peel back more layers of the sound.<\/p>\n \u201cLook at \u2018Man of the Year,\u2019\u201d Stack says. \u201cAt the top it\u2019s literally one note on bass and her vocal. That\u2019s, like, scary<\/i> raw.\u201d<\/p>\n Lorde\u2019s Ultrasound tour, which launched in mid-September and will stop Oct. 18 at Inglewood\u2019s Kia Forum, carries that rawness into arenas with a bracingly minimalist production built around her performance.<\/p>\n \u201cSince \u2018Solar Power,\u2019 I\u2019ve made a concerted effort in my work to try and strip away any decorative elements,\u201d the singer says in Burbank as she puts the finishing touches on the show. \u201cI\u2019m really into plainness.\u201d<\/p>\n For the first time, she plans to wear jeans onstage; her merch, she points out, uses the basic Times New Roman font. \u201cThe less the better,\u201d she says. \u201cThen the idea transfers.\u201d<\/p>\n The no-frills approach has made it difficult to integrate some of her older work, particularly the ornate psych-folk tunes from \u201cSolar Power.\u201d Yet Lorde views it as her duty as a performer to \u201cbring all these parts of myself forward,\u201d she says \u2014 even the songs that seem now like vestiges of a different life.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Buzzcut Season,\u2019 I think I was almost 15 when I wrote that,\u201d she says of the track from her 2013 debut, \u201cPure Heroine.\u201d \u201cI hear this baby in the backing vocals.\u201d<\/p>\n Do any of her old songs feel beyond reach at this point?<\/p>\n \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d she replies.<\/p>\n Such as?<\/p>\n \u201cNope,\u201d she says, laughing as she declines to specify \u2014 though she notes that she\u2019s not referring to anything in the show. \u201cI can\u2019t play it if I can\u2019t get there.\u201d<\/p>\n Before her previous tour, in 2022, Lorde underwent MDMA and psilocybin therapy as a way of dealing with her longstanding stage fright. Today she says she hasn\u2019t done MDMA since then but has continued with psilocybin, which she hopes to do for the rest of her life.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce a year having this transformative wipeout and getting all this new information \u2014 it\u2019s a really cool thing to me,\u201d she says. \u201cI love the image of being 80 and still ripping it.\u201d<\/p>\n What used to fuel her stage fright, she says, was her belief that there was a right way and a wrong way to perform. Now, thanks in part to the psychedelics, she understands that \u201cthere is no wrong way \u2014 the only wrong way would be to be inauthentic.\u201d<\/p>\n Surely, some pop fans are longing to behold perfection.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, but they\u2019re not coming to my show,\u201d she says. \u201cI mean, if you are, I\u2019m sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n That attitude extends to how Lorde thinks about her physical appearance. She remembers being \u201csliced\u201d when she was 16 by a comment someone left on Twitter \u2014 \u201cchicken noodle body\u201d \u2014 under a paparazzi shot of her on the beach in a bikini.<\/p>\n In the last few years, though, she\u2019s realized that \u201cbeing very dogmatic with my body is a surefire way to feel really bad,\u201d she says. On tour behind \u201cSolar Power,\u201d \u201cI was very conscious of the size of my body and how the tummy would look onstage. I felt those same questions pop up in advance of this one, and I was like, no, no \u2014 to be true to the mission is actually to do none of that.\u201d<\/p>\n Read more:<\/b> How Jensen McRae became L.A.’s next great songwriter<\/a><\/p>\n There\u2019s a way to frame Lorde\u2019s dressed-down vibe as a rejection of the pop pageantry we associate with Taylor Swift<\/a> or Sabrina Carpenter<\/a> or Chappell Roan<\/a>. Lorde\u2019s not so sure about that.<\/p>\n \u201cI think my thing is pageantry in a different way,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s pageantry in the Times New Roman, you know? The negative space is a statement.\u201d<\/p>\n Even so, after years of feeling like an outlier, Lorde has come to understand her role in music slightly differently. \u201cI\u2019m not a thoroughbred,\u201d she says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t destined to do this for any reason other than I was like, someone\u2019s gotta speak \u2014 I\u2019m<\/i> gonna speak.\u201d<\/p>\n With \u201cVirgin,\u201d she says, \u201cI wanted to make a document of my femininity because I didn\u2019t have it. And I thought once I made it, other people would be like, \u2018Oh yeah, that\u2019s me too.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n How would you compare the idea of femininity on \u201cVirgin\u201d to the ideas on your earlier records?<\/b>
\n
This is gonna sound weird, but I honestly feel like \u201cVirgin\u201d is my first album as a woman. I\u2019ve never felt my femininity to be particularly close at hand, and certainly on \u201cPure Heroine,\u201d I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any gender attached to that narrator. I wasn\u2019t really there yet \u2014 [I was] a teenager. A big reason for making \u201cVirgin\u201d was I felt my sense of femininity crash into me one day. I was like, \u201cHoly f\u2014, it\u2019s this<\/i>? And this<\/i>? And this<\/i>?\u201d<\/p>\n