It really is the year of our Lorde once again. This week, with "What Was That" still ringing in our ears, we got many relevant details about the singer's long-awaited new album Virgin, which is coming in June. Now the interviews are starting to flow.
Speaking to BBC Radio 1 in her first press spot of the Virgin cycle, Lorde addressed a subject that will probably come up a lot this year: the impact of Charli XCX's Brat (and Lorde's experience working it out on the remix) on her own creative process. She replied in the affirmative, explaining that it affirmed her decision to be radically vulnerable on her own new LP:
I'd been kind of cooking this album up. We were like quite a way into it at that point. But Brat coming out really gave me a kick in a lot of ways. It forced me to further define what I was doing because Charli had so masterfully defined everything about Brat. And I knew that what I was doing was very distinct to that. And also just, like, it's just this amazing thing when a peer, like, throws the gauntlet down like that. You're like, "OK, yeah. I'll..."
And I've spoken to a lot of peers who all had the same feelings. It's very sick and I'm so grateful to her. But also, yeah, I had been trying to express in this very naked way. And then Brat came out and she was kind of doing that from the other side of the coin almost. And doing the remix together and kind of meeting her in that place of, like, rugged vulnerability and kind of like cracking open the thing — and people responded really well to that — I was like, "OK, OK, cool! This is a good thing to be doing."
Meanwhile, Lorde sat down with the artist Martine Syms for one of those "famous friends interview each other" situations at Document. They start off with some talk about Easter and 4/20, and drugs remain a subject later on, when Lorde says, "If I hadn’t smoked weed, I don’t think I would be an artist." Eventually, they explore the subject of "What Was That" and its music video, which incorporates scenes from Lorde's pop-up listening event in New York's Washington Square Park. The conversation took place before the pop-up. Here's what she had to say:
"What Was That." We just started there because it’s the beginning. It was the first music of my rebirth that had come out of me, and I felt it start the day that we did that. I had come back from London to New York after this period of great turbulence in my personal life. Becoming single, but also really facing my body stuff head-on, and starting to feel my gender broadening a little bit. Just being back in my house and feeling this big wave of grief. I just kept thinking, What was all of that? Whether it was my seven-year relationship or a pandemic or sacrificing my body to my career since I was 16 or 17. This feeling of, Oh, my God, so much has moved through me. And there’s so much mystery and pain. I just held the mic and sort of walked around the room and said it all. I didn’t write anything down, which was cool.
Then the video, all I said making it was just like, max aliveness. And it definitely has that feeling. We shot two-thirds of this video, which is me moving through the city, and I go up through a tunnel and pop out of a manhole in Washington Square Park. Tomorrow night, I’m going to tell people to come to the park, and I’m going to play them a song, and we’re going to be filming that, and then we’ll go straight to the edit, put that into the video, and then the video comes out the next day. It doesn’t even look that good. I mean, your work looks so fucking good, but there’s this confidence in the fact that the aliveness is what’s going to make it look good, not necessarily needing to grip super tightly to a way of producing this end result, or whatever. This video was made to degrade. I’ve spent a lot of my career making these objects that will last through time and be beautiful in perpetuity. I was like, "No, let this one degrade almost immediately." It is a risk. But it feels like where I'm meant to be, and if people don’t get it, it’s all good.
The idea of making a music video that degrades immediately feels very in keeping with the modern approach to media, in which creative work is treated as so disposable. I like the idea of a music video that's the equivalent to a deluxe Snapchat. Anyway, here's footage of the BBC chat:
