There is a note of sadness in Lorde’s voice as she thinks back to her last visit to Ireland. “I was deep in the weeds,” she says. “I was about a week post break-up of my long-term relationship and I was really stuck. I had sort of just come off my birth control. I was having this crazy kind of hormonal swing.”
This was August 2023, and Lorde – aka the songwriter and pop star Ella Yelich-O’Connor – was headlining the All Together Now festival in Waterford. On a gorgeous blue-skied evening, her performance was typically confident and cathartic, as she moved, quicksilver-fast, between hits such as Team and Green Light, the effervescent 2017 banger that she wrote with Taylor Swift’s producer Jack Antonoff.
[ Lorde at All Together Now: Knockout performance underscores singer’s star powerOpens in new window ]
Behind the scenes, though, she was reeling. She had split from her partner of nearly a decade, the Australian record executive Justin Warren, and was also working through the emotional aftershock of a brief eating disorder – subjects that she addresses frankly and viscerally on her brilliantly propulsive new album, Virgin. “This record is a byproduct of an insane personal quest of the last couple of years,” she says.
Lorde has never held back as a songwriter: her debut single, Royals, for example, from 2013, took aim at the music industry’s history of prioritising commerce over art. Still, even by her own highly confessional standards, the honesty with which she talks about body image on Virgin is striking. “I cover up all the mirrors … make a meal I won’t eat,” she sings on the single What Was That, a bittersweet disco onslaught that blends euphoria and emotional torment.
Smiling softly, she explains that working on the album was part of the process of making herself whole again – and of reflecting on her issues around her weight.
“It was actually really hard for me to accept. I almost still can’t accept it. I’m lucky in that it wasn’t very long,” she says. “It could definitely have been a lot worse. For me, any kind of restriction of who I am supposed to be just does not work. It completely blocked my creativity and cut me off from a life force.
“It took me quite a long time to realise that was happening. It’s also like this evil little rite of passage for a lot of women. I don’t think it’s a unique experience I had. It felt algorithmically predestined or something.”
Yelich-O’Connor was a 16-year-old kid from the Auckland suburbs when Royals became a global number one; the follow-up album, Pure Heroine, went on to sell more than five million copies. Her megastardom endures: tickets for her first stand-alone Dublin show, at the RDS this November, sold out in a heartbeat.
That journey – a rollercoaster with no emergency brake – has left scars. Virgin is, in part, a reckoning with that painful transformation from everyday teenager to international chart-topper.
“You form totally differently when people are looking at you from a young age,” she says. “I still dream probably once a month that a man is taking a photo of me with a long-lens camera. It’s deep in my subconscious that someone might be looking at me and capturing something that I’m [not ready] for them to see.”
But she was ready to show a vulnerable side last year when she and Charli XCX, her friend and fellow star, collaborated on a remix of Charli’s song Girl, So Confusing. The crowning moment in Charli’s “Brat summer”, the track was also a red-letter moment for Lorde, in that it flung the veil off a period of immense turmoil.
Girl, So Confusing, which thrillingly combines Charli’s Day-Glo mosh-pit energy with Lorde’s elevated goth vibes, had its origins in a low-key rift between these close acquaintances. Lorde was going through her issues, and Charli was aware of a growing distance between the two. She wondered if she had said or done something. It was, as Charli sang, “so confusing”.
On the remix, which confirmed internet speculation about the identity of the “girl” in the lyrics, Lorde sets her straight, singing, “for the last couple years I’ve been at war in my body. I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back. I was trapped in the hatred.”
“It felt super scary and vulnerable for me to be expressing on that level,” Lorde says about the song, which she joined Charli XCX on stage to sing at Coachella earlier this year. “But I had been working on Virgin for a good while at that point and was trying to make this statement about femininity that was uncompromising and very truthful.”
Lorde talks about embracing “discomfort” as a tool for personal growth. That was point of Girl, So Confusing and the two singles she has released from Virgin, What Was That and Man of the Year, the latter a stark unpacking of her 2023 break-up.
“I’d come to this realisation as an artist that my personal discomfort is … I’m not going to let my fear stand in the way of making an expression of truth that feels really important to make,” she says.
“It might, I don’t know, be helpful for other people to hear. Just doing the scary thing – I was, like, just see what happens if you do it. And [it was] so cool that I had been working on this album and then, kind of unbeknownst to me, Charli had been processing her own uncompromising womanhood, trying to become that sort of woman also.
“It felt like the right moment to test the waters of the direction of some of the subject matter I’d been writing for my own record and [meet] her vulnerability with my own vulnerability. There had to be something on the line for it to really land. It was freaky – but beautiful too. I felt something release in me when the song released.”
Testing the waters included talking about her feelings about gender. She told Rolling Stone recently that she is “in the middle gender-wise” – a point she reiterates in Hammer, her new album’s opening track, singing, “some days I’m a woman/ some days I’m a man”. (In recent public appearances she had been dressing in androgynous grey slacks and tees.)
Lorde clarifies that she still identifies as a woman but has always felt a masculine energy within her, something she has historically pushed down, feeling that society would judge her. On Virgin she is learning to embrace it. If men are allowed get in touch with their feminine side, why can’t women celebrate their inner masculinity?
“We have these containers, some of which are really helpful and work really well for us, and some of which just don’t do the job. And for me, understanding that I am a woman, that’s how I identify … I don’t see that changing,” she says.
“But there’s also something in me that is masculine, and I’ve always been that way since I was a child. There was a ‘bothness’ to me. And being okay with that, not being easy to be boxed up, you … It can be a bit uncomfortable to not have the tidiness. But I think that it’s worth it for me to be true to myself and see what comes as a result.”
Born in 1996, Lorde grew up on Auckland’s North Shore, the daughter of a poet mother of Croatian heritage and a civil-engineer father of Irish extraction. When she was six she was identified as a “gifted child”, though her mother vetoed her attending a school for children of exceptional intelligence, fearing it might impact her social development.
She was undoubtedly precocious: she was a keen poetry reader before her 10th birthday; at 14 she was editing her mother’s master’s thesis.
Her musical breakthrough was the result of talent, luck and perseverance. A friend of her father’s saw her perform at a school talent contest, in which she sang songs by Pixie Lott and Duffy. Impressed by her haunting voice and natural stage presence, he tipped off Universal Records, which paired her with the veteran indie musician Joel Little.
Hitting it off immediately, they would work together during weekends or when O’Connor was on school holidays, capturing in music the experiences of being a teenager: the intensity of adolescent friendship, the big dreams, the anxiety about the future.
All of those were poured into Royals, an overnight hit that knocked Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball off the top of the US charts and made Lorde, at 16, the youngest woman to have a US number one since Tiffany, with I Think We’re Alone Now, in 1987.
Virgin is in many ways a continuation of Royals and Pure Heroine, in that it is immediately catchy yet has an aura of mystery. What’s new is what Lorde identifies as the record’s “visceral” quality: it feels like a body-horror movie in reverse.
The cover image is a blue-tinted X-ray of a pelvis that shows a belt buckle, a trouser zip and, referencing her decision to come off birth control, a contraceptive coil. Her lyrics talk unflinchingly about women’s bodies: ovulation, piercings and the cutting of the umbilical cord. It oozes emotional gore, but in a way intended to celebrate rather than shame or stigmatise.
“I felt I didn’t have a document, or a piece of art, that expressed to me the visceral, intense, gross ... but also beautiful ... glory … all these elements to being in a female body. I need them all to be present.
“There’s something pretty unsparing about how I do it. I believe that is a statement of value. When I was making the album I was, like, ‘I don’t see women’s bodies, I don’t see the fullness of a woman’s body online…' It feels important to me to show this.”
Virgin arrives four years after Lorde’s previous LP, Solar Power. A departure from her more zestful pop, the album had a languid, lulling quality that threw much of her audience. It was mesmerising, but there were no bangers. Some fans are still conflicted about it.
Lorde adores the record – and believes she is a stronger artist for putting out a project perceived as not having done as well as its predecessors.
“I love that album. I’m so grateful for it. I’m so proud of myself, actually, for making it, because it required a big step off the path or on to another path, maybe,” she says.
“It changed me as an artist. I’d been sort of this like golden child, and I had had this experience of having the first things that I put out being met with such a glowing response in a lot of ways.
“Having a response that was different to that was super, like, informative. It made me realise that you have got to be making work that, no matter what the response is, you just love … 100 per cent, because that response” – public adulation – “isn’t guaranteed, and it can’t be what’s going to fill you up.”
Lorde would like to think that Virgin will be received differently – but she won’t be devastated if that’s not the case.
“I really remember saying that I wanted ... to feel, no matter what happens tomorrow, this is everything I want. I’m so proud of this. There’s nothing I would do differently. I remember saying that to myself and totally feel like that … This could get panned, God forbid, but it could – and I would [still] love it so much.” Solar Power “taught me a lot. I do love that album. It’s beautiful and sweet.”
Famous her entire adult existence, Lorde has experienced both the highs and the lows of life in the spotlight. Does she ever feel in competition with other women artists? That’s how the industry often works, after all, setting women musicians against each other, making them feel that, for them to thrive, others must fail.
“I was talking to Charli about this, actually. She said, ‘Yeah, we all have our fragile eras.’ Sometimes you’re just in your fragile era, and I think particularly when you’re forming a statement, like when I’m making an album but it’s early days, and I don’t really have any architecture that I’m living underneath, that can absolutely be the moment where the kind of competition – or, sorry, the comparison – can creep up.”
Her way of working through those doubts has been to acknowledge that there’s a certain sound only she can make: to embrace the pure, heroic Lordeness of who she is and what she does.
“Honestly, the last couple years I’ve just been on such a mission of trying to really understand what it is that only I can do, because there’s just so much value in that, and that really has shifted my mindset away from, like, ‘Oh, but I can’t do this as well as she can do this.’ I’m, like, ‘No … you’re one of one. You’re the number-one expert in the world at doing your thing.’ She pauses and smiles again. “It’s helpful.”
Virgin is released on Friday, June 27th. Lorde plays the RDS, in Dublin, on Saturday, November 22nd
