Lorde has admitted her 2021 LP ‘Solar Power’ doesn’t feel like “me” in hindsight.
The 28-year-old New Zealand pop star will return with the long-awaited follow-up, ‘Virgin’, on June 27, and upon reflection, the ‘Green Light’ hitmaker has admitted she doesn’t identify with the person she was on the predecessor.
Speaking on ‘Therapuss with Jake Shane’ about her 2017/2018 tour, she said: “It was also so crazy touring ‘Melodrama’. I found it very intense for that whole time to be in this endless hardcore music [atmosphere] every night.
“I found it pretty intense and I just wanted something light and easy after that. It was cool.”
She later said about her third studio effort: “I love ‘Solar Power’ so much, and I truly needed to make it.
“I wouldn’t be here with another album if I hadn’t made ‘Solar Power’. But it showed me that you have no choice but to be who you’re supposed to be.
“Me disappearing and being all wafty… I was like ‘actually, I don’t think this is me.’”
Lorde recently admitted “a lot of people” won’t think she’s a “good girl anymore” after hearing ‘Virgin’.
The pop star – real name Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor – predicts that the LP, which “promises” to be a “bold evolution in her sound and storytelling”, will see her lose and gain fans as she gets vulnerable on sensitive topics including self-discovery, gender identity, and personal transformation.
She told Rolling Stone magazine:“There’s going to be a lot of people who don’t think I’m a good girl anymore, a good woman. It’s over.
“It will be over for a lot of people, and then for some people, I will have arrived. I’ll be where they always hoped I’d be.”
Lorde also expanded on her gender identity, insisting she is a “woman except for the days when I’m a man”.
Recounting the time her fellow pop star Chappell Roan asked if she is non-binary, she told the publication: “'[Chappell Roan] asked me this.
“She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.’”
The writer added of the singer’s identity: “Though Lorde still calls herself a cis woman and her pronouns remain unchanged, she describes herself as ‘in the middle gender-wise,’ a person more comfortable with the fluidity of her expression.
“In some ways, she feels like her teenage self again, back when her friends were mostly boys and there was a looseness in how she dressed and acted.”