Lorde doesn’t want to be pop royalty any more

As her new album Solar Power is released, the New Zealand singer-songwriter is happy to keep her celebrity in the shade.

New Zealand pop singer-songwriter Lorde, whose third album Solar Power is released in August. Picture: Ophelia Mikkelson Jones

Eight years ago, Lorde was a precocious teen with an anti-materialist anthem (Royals) that, ironically, made her pop royalty. Now, she’s trying to take things down a notch.

On Friday, the singer-songwriter releases her third album, Solar Power, a tribute to the joys of summer in her homeland of New Zealand. Its lead single, the title track, has an unexpectedly sunny sound – a departure from the melodramatic ballads that marked her last album and have inspired a generation of female musicians from Billie Eilish to Olivia Rodrigo. The album, which references a “teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash” on its opening track, comes with a tour of US theatres next year, instead of bigger arenas, allowing the 24-year-old artist to cater to her most loyal fans in a relatively intimate setting.

“It’s exactly where I want to be,” Lorde says. “I would much rather have a room with 5000 people in it who know every word to every song and are passionate about me as an institution, than have 18,000 people who heard two songs on the radio and liked them.”

Music superstars traditionally chase bigger sales and greater fame. Next-generation pop stars like Lorde are increasingly exercising more control over their ­careers and behaving like cult acts to protect their creative vision. During her previous tour, Lorde played two roughly 19,000-­capacity venues in the New York area. For Solar Power, she announced two gigs at Radio City Music Hall, which seats 6000.

“It’s not about climbing greater heights,” says Debra Rathwell, executive vice-president of global touring and talent at concert-promotion giant AEG Presents, which runs Lorde’s tours. She says she approached Lorde with two different plans for arenas, but the artist had said “it’s not what she wants to do with this record. She’s been very insistent.”

Lorde, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O’Connor, has been right-sizing her career ever since exploding into superstardom with Royals, which made her the youngest solo artist to top the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart since Tiffany in 1988.

The song’s success – it has sold more than 10 million copies in the US, according to the Recording Industry Association of America – fuelled towering commercial expectations. “There was definitely a moment where I could have gone either way,” Lorde says.

Kiwi pop star Lorde. Picture: Frontier Touring

After her moody, minimalist sound penetrated the pop mainstream, Lorde aimed for a medium-sized level of fame. For her second album, 2017’s Melodrama, she toured arenas with a more ambitious stage production, but her music, which tackled a break-up and themes of growing up, was challenging.

Melodrama was nominated for album of the year at the Grammy Awards and is widely considered one of the best records of the decade. But it was thought to be a commercial underperformer in some industry circles. Melodrama was “a lot more specific and strange, and [it] wasn’t as ­immediately massive as people might have thought,” Lorde says. “And so there were times on that tour where it didn’t sell out.” With Solar Power, Lorde is getting more personal and experimental. For one thing, it features the sounds of cicadas.

The album has a soft-sounding rock vibe with languid guitars and soothing backing vocals. On The Path, the opening track, she sings, “if you’re looking for a saviour, well, that’s not me”. Solar Power also showcases Lorde’s skills as a writer and producer – she wrote and produced the album with Jack Antonoff, but wrote some songs on her own.

“I don’t want to say it sounds like New Zealand, but it sounds like my New Zealand – my summer at home,” she says. If Melodrama was “like midnight to 2.30am”, Solar Power is “like 2 to 5pm – it’s golden hour”. The music video for the title track features Lorde and friends frolicking on a beach. A more ruminative song, Stoned at the Nail Salon, tackles ageing.

Lorde wants to avoid the burdens of celebrity. Picture: Ophelia Mikkelson Jones

“I don’t know if I’m ‘arena girl,’ you know?” she says. “I would be in the basement of a sports venue, showering in the basketball lockers – or, like, [the venue] would be named after a fast-food restaurant – and I’d just [think], ‘I don’t know if this is me.’ I’m an amphitheatre girl. I’m a 150-year-old theatre girl.” (So far, Covid-19 hasn’t affected her tour plans.) Lorde’s downsized approach may align with a fervent, but more niche, fan base. The song Solar Power peaked at only No.64 on the Hot 100 singles chart.

But Lorde is making other anti-commercial moves too. She isn’t selling a traditional CD this time around, but rather an eco-friendly “music box” that includes various collectibles and a digital download containing the album and two bonus tracks. (Sales of the “music box” are not eligible for the Billboard 200 album chart, Billboard says.) Such tactics fit Lorde’s approach to celebrity. She is relatively private, limiting her use of social media and disappearing for long stretches between albums to be with family and friends. She updates fans via a newsletter and doesn’t worry about being forgotten in today’s fast-moving music business.

“I have zero anxiety about it, but I’m sure there is someone with a spreadsheet somewhere, who can point to the ways in which I’m making less money,” she says. “I had this conversation with my manager. I said, ‘I have more money than I could ever spend in my life. I own a home. I own some lovely rugs and great furniture and can buy whatever I want at the grocery store. Like, we’re good on money.’”

It’s a recurring theme in the music industry that sometimes the musical innovators don’t reap all the financial rewards. Culturally, Lorde is becoming such an anomaly: an A-list celebrity whose album sales don’t quite match her reputation. Some of her heirs have become blockbuster artists.

But that suits Lorde just fine. A little while ago, she says, she was out in Los Angeles and the paparazzi didn’t even know who she was. “It’s the coolest,” she says. “To be able to have this huge amount of respect, but also still have my life, and not be so famous that my quality of life is disturbed – that’s the dream.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Lorde’s album Solar Power is reviewed on Saturday in Review.