Lorde's ride of 'existential crises' can finally come to an end

Ella Yelich O’Connor, aka Lorde, has gone on a ride in and out of “various existential crises” in the lead up to the release of her new album.

But this week, the Auckland born musician told RNZ she was finally at peace. Nervous, but at peace. She shared in full her fourth album, Virgin, with audiences in New York on Monday night. On Wednesday evening, Kiwi fans got their first listen at parties around the country and on midnight Friday, it dropped around the world.

“I had the sense last night that I've kind of left it all on the field, as I say in one of the songs on this album," she told RNZ's Tony Stamp.

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Hear Lorde's full interview with Tony Stamp on Music 101 on Saturday 28 June

“….I felt that I pushed it about as far as I could and really excavated a lot that was very deep in me. So I'm feeling quite peaceful today.”

Lorde’s promotion of this album has been dynamic. She debuted the track ‘What Was That’ in April at an impromptu set at Washington Square Park, sharing new music for the first time since 2021. The next month she popped up at a Lorde-themed club night in Sydney for a boogy.

At the end of May, on the eve of the Aotearoa Music Awards, a cryptic invitation lured Kiwi fans to a late night session in the loo of an inner-city YMCA. There, she pulled out a lighting case from one of the toilet cubicles, turning it into a make-shift stage and serving unreleased singles - 'Current Affairs', 'Ribs' and 'Broken Glass'.

There’s also been the intimate interviews – most notably the Rolling Stone cover story in which the 28-year-old revealed her struggles with disordered eating, psychedelic drug use and an “expansive” journey with gender.

She told RNZ this week that her disordered eating emerged in the pandemic.

“I think a lot of women had a similar experience where, you know, there was so little that you could control except for kind of your own body.

“It felt like something happened algorithmically as well. There was this very harmful, dark fitness underbelly that came through.

“…. I think a lot of women… unfortunately sort of went down. It sort of feels like some illness that is dormant in you, you know, as a woman in our culture that, yeah, kind of took me for a bit.”

The album Virgin, she says, reflects how she is gently trying to focus on how things feel rather than how things look and “seeing what happens”.

“I've never felt more love and respect for my body. I've never felt stronger. I'm very physically strong now and I'm proud of how that strength looks on me.

“… I had this feeling the other day of, you know, I wish there was more of me because I just, you know, that's the degree to which my thinking has changed around my body.”

Unlike the home-based Solar Power album, part of Virgin was written in Lorde’s New York apartment, and a new music video dropped with scenes filmed in Hampstead Heath during 2023. She describes the album as “city music” which reflects her gritty experiences abroad.

“There's kind of an ugliness to the world of Virgin,” she explains.

“There's an economy, sort of something quite unsparing and a bit gross … which I think sort of comes from city life, from being in these shared spaces. I think of the pigeons as being, like, legitimately a key part of Virgin as crazy as that sounds.

“You know, sometimes if someone takes a photo of you and you're like, I don't necessarily love this, but I know that's how I look. That's what I was trying to do with Virgin.”

Virgin is also somewhat of a break-up album, but not in the way fans might expect.

“There is a real sort of sovereignty to Virgin that comes from cutting a whole lot of cords, whether they be to … keeping yourself as small as possible in your body or denying … the fullness of your gender.”

The shift in intensity of Virgin, she says, is a reflection of a “wildness I needed to be in touch with”.

“I understood this after I finished making the album, but the album is particularly sort of like fleshy and bodily, I think, as a response to, partly as a response to feeling our world and seeing the female body sort of get increasingly kind of optimised and kind of being this site for sort of tech in many different ways.

“I got back on social media and was like, there's a kind of female body that I'm really craving. And I think I have to use my own to see it.”

In her own words, the album at times sounds like “a construction site, or a siren or something”. It’s unrefined and crude, she says.

“…There was this intensity that I was looking for that was not masked necessarily, like more sort of tapping into something very deep in me as a woman.”

Like the unique promotion of the singles from this album, Lorde’s fingerprints are all over the branding – from the IUD on the album cover to choice of Times New Roman as the font and the style of music videos.

“It's so handmade by me.

“… I'm always like insanely invested, but this one was different. It just felt like really a conversation between me and like a really sort of deep part of myself going on.”

Lorde’s Ultrasound tour will kick off in September, and while NZ isn’t yet named on the bill, she promises RNZ that schedule will be added to.

“I'm feeling really keen to spend a bit more time in Aotearoa as well, which has been sort of something I've been missing the last couple of years.