Lorde announces Australian tour for third album Solar Power

For Lorde – who sings in her latest release that “she’s kind of like a prettier Jesus” – it’s one better than a second coming.

The New Zealand indie-pop star, who has sold more than 12 million albums and clocked 10 billion streams, announced on Tuesday that she will tour her highly-anticipated third album Solar Power in Australia between March 10 and 19, 2022.

The tour to Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth will be her third in Australia and her first since her sold-out tour of Melodrama in 2017.

And Lorde, real name Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, proved she’s still creating sassy, spirited songs when she released her first new music in four years, also called Solar Power, to time with the solar eclipse in June.

A still from Lorde’s new video Solar Power.

Penned with pop producer wunderkind Jack Antonoff and with backing vocals from Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers, the acoustic-driven song stands apart in sound from Melodrama and her 2013 breakout album Pure Heroine.

But it is almost as hard to get the accompanying album artwork out of one’s head as it is the new tune. The image of Lorde, which can only be described as cheeky, triggered a flood of inspired memes, which will surely rate among the internet’s best work for the year.

In an interview with Triple J, Lorde said she had been in hibernation while she worked on the album and she had started writing the single summers ago. The 24-year-old first rose to fame when she was 16 with tracks including Royals and Tennis Court and has since become one of the biggest pop stars of the decade with two Grammy Awards to her name.

“Every song on the album, I did say it has to sound like the sun, and this one in a big way. It sounds like the beach, the waves, the girls lying on the beach. I really wanted it to have that vibe. The guitars, the drums – everything’s so sunny,” Lorde said. “It’s definitely my most complex work – as a producer, as an arranger, as a musician. But I also love how light, playful, and fun it is.”

As for the memes? Lorde knows.

“It’s a specific experience thinking about everyone in your life seeing your butt,” she told Triple J. “I have no regrets. I love this cover and happy for this to be how people see my butt.”

Lorde at the Sydney Opera House in 2017.Credit: Don Arnold/Getty

“I was sent a couple of memes. They were very funny, I liked them. I’m so out of touch with meme culture but I’m down. All the memes!”

The tour will start in New Zealand in February before heading to Australia and then onto Europe, the UK and North America. Tickets will go on sale in July with the full album to be released on August 20.

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