Lorde shares her most uncomfortable album yet
With ‘Virgin’, the NZ pop superstar delivers the biggest – and most personal – album of the year.
After four albums and more than a decade of making music, Lorde – the artist born Ella Yelich-O’Connor – has had a realisation. “When I was touring (my third album) Solar Power it was cool, playing everything that I’d made thus far and realising there is an expression that comes from me … That feels like ‘The Lorde Song’,” the New Zealand powerhouse told Vogue Australia this month. Appearing on the cover of the magazine for the fourth time, Lorde summed up what makes her two time Grammy Award-winning sound so unique. “This kind of intensity, vulnerability and catharsis. There’s always pain. There’s always joy. There’s an expression that comes out of me again and again that feels like mine.”
All these themes are present in her fourth album Rebirth, released this week. From the vulnerability of detailing the fluidity of her gender identity – “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” she sings on her new single ‘Hammer’ – and in examining her previous disordered relationship with her body. She sings of the joy of overcoming that, of the intensity of awaiting the results of a pregnancy test in ‘Clearblue’ and of the catharsis of discussing her relationship with her mother on ‘Favourite Daughter’. It’s a personal album and “a lot more real-feeling”, created without an over-intellectualised concept or any sense of creative inhibition.
“I don’t choose what comes out of me,” Lorde told Vogue Australia’s July issue, on sale Monday July 7.
“There were times making this album when I wished it was smoother, more refined, less close to the bone. I was like, do we have to be writing about how I felt when I looked in the mirror those two years where I just counted everything I ate? Like, do we have to… I think if I needed that song to exist, and it doesn’t, then it’s my duty to try and make it, you know? Even if that’s uncomfortable for me.”
The July issue of Vogue Australia featuring cover star Lorde is out on Monday, July 7
The past few years in between her third album Solar Power, released in 2021, and the release of Virgin this month, have been spent in slowly breaking down the walls around her, resulting in some of the artist’s most vulnerable and intimate work yet. Her fear, in the making of this album, was that the person who emerged might not be one people wanted to hear from.
“As I come into myself in this full way, I’m gonna lose some people... I felt really afraid about where that would lead me, but I decided I had no choice,” she says. “Some people love it, some people are repulsed by it, you know? And I’m okay with that.”
Lorde also points to her recent verse on Charli xcx’s song ‘Girl, So Confusing’, in which the pair worked out all their past angst on the remix. “That was so vulnerable for me, saying what I said to her,” she admits. “But I had the sense that us having this conversation would have meaning past our personal experience and to see it, to feel it, connect with people the way that it did, really galvanised my faith in putting my discomfort aside and trying to be vulnerable like that.”
Speaking to the magazine on the eve of the album’s release, the 28-year-old calmly prepared to face its reception, both critically and from her fans, many of whom have been following her since her first single ‘Royals’ was released when she was 16. “I’m totally aware that a lot of what I’m bringing is uncomfortable,” she said. “It presses into these places that just make everyone feel differently. Some people love it, some people are repulsed by it, you know? And I’m okay with that.”
Vogue Australia’s July issue is on sale Monday, July 7.
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