After four years of not-quite-wilderness, Lorde has returned to the charts. It’s music, recession style. At the end of April she released a breakup song called “What Was That”. The song’s anthemic structure, metallic production and handheld music video all lead away from the New Age setup of her last album and into the tail end of the do-it-yourself “indie sleaze” era from which she originally emerged. She followed it up this week with “Man of the Year”, a genderbending ballad about becoming your ex. Like “What Was That”, its video evokes several things that all come from 2013: there’s a bit of the original “Royals” video, a gasp of Lars von Trier’s dimly-lit Nymphomaniac films, and, thanks to some symbolic breast tape, a vague visual idea of the Free the Nipple movement.
Perhaps this nostalgic tendency is a way to draw fans back into the original Lorde project. But the rest of the album rollout feels darker and edgier. It’s called Virgin and a press release claims it will be “100% WRITTEN IN BLOOD;” the album cover features an ultrasound image of a female pelvis with an IUD in it. An all-caps mission statement sounds slightly too much like the one written for Charli XCX’s Brat, the album of last summer; where Charli wrote “THE ARTWORK WILL BE… OBNOXIOUS, ARROGANT AND BOLD… WE MUST CULTIVATE DESIRE, CHAOS AND DESTRUCTION”, Lorde responds “THE COLOUR OF THE ALBUM IS CLEAR… FULL TRANSPARENCY…MY FEMININITY…RAW, PRIMAL, INNOCENT, ELEGANT.”
Brat shot Charli XCX into the mainstream and simultaneously gave Lorde a route back to indie-pop acclaim. The Brat track track “Girl, So Confusing” covered the emotional fallout of a decade-long not-quite feud between the two singers, who had emerged at about the same time as doppelgangers and alt-pop competitors. The track’s cultural afterlife seemed planned out from the beginning: “One day we might make some music / The Internet would go crazy”. The internet went crazy, but it was always going to – the merging of confessional songwriting and pop culture in-jokes meant everyone could feel like part of the story.
Any mortal artist can be forgiven for wanting to create their own Brat moment; to define the soundscape of the year; to bathe in such acute commercial success. And it is possible that Lorde in 2025 has even more to prove than Charli in 2024.
Lorde was a smart teenager – she dropped an era-defining alt-pop album, largely disappeared from the public eye and then dropped another one. Her whole brand was based on distance, both from her fanbase and her real-life attachments. She was only 16 on the release of Royals, and the child-prodigy veneer created a lasting mystique (conspiracy theorists claimed she was actually 45). She was known for dodging the usual trappings of pop stardom, like tight choreography and sexualised photoshoots. Moral ambiguity ruled her lyrics,
But the aura was shattered on the 2021 release of her third album, Solar Power. The music videos were her first to incorporate bright daylight, back-up dancers and full-body bikini shots; the music was languid and folky and boring. She managed genuine sexual provocation for about a second on the album cover, which placed a camera under her bare legs. With Solar Power she negated her core persona. With Virgin she is trying to claw it back. And with that, the attention and critical acclaim lacking from her most recent era.
It will not be so simple. Lorde’s nipple-taping and multitude-containing femininity is clearly supposed to shock, but now we have left the 2010s (when Lorde was last pop star supreme) it barely lands. Provocation means nothing when there is no constant audience to provoke, and when you have to rely on an unstable algorithm instead of the overarching narratives of the mainstream press. All of her vacillating and re-referencing is bad news for a modern musician: the death of the monoculture also means the death of the celebrity rebrand. Pop music must have a constant visual identity, because it now arrives without a face; catchy parts of songs get big in the background of short videos and are quickly forgotten afterwards.
Instead we have had Lorde, the histrionic adolescent with Melodrama and Pure Heroine. Then Lorde the sun-god, under Solar Power’s visual language. Now she is reverting to her teenage self, with extra gender-bending addition.
There are still certain pop personae who genuinely come from the Soundcloud wilds; who are supposed to be above it all. They’re ruined if they behave too self-consciously, reference too much or show any sign of deliberate self-marketing. Lorde is one of them. Her existing mythos forbids her from deliberately stepping forwards or backwards in time; she “played against type” just by appearing on Brat, which broke with past convention by placing her for the first time in a distinct universe of other leftfield pop singers. It feels wrong to see her building on recent internet hype, or on her past career, or even on the postmodern assortment of references underpinning Solar Power. She is supposed to be a soothsayer, and she needs to be able to see the future.
[See more: Wes Anderson’s sense of an ending]
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