Lorde has spent much of her life — ever since she signed with Universal Music Group at 13 — in the music industry. In 2013, she was thrust into pop star status with her GRAMMY-winning debut single "Royals." At a time when YOLO era party music was still climbing the chart, the young New Zealander born Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor shook things up with an anthem for bored suburbanites and small-town youth.
She soon proved she had more where that came from on Pure Heroine, filled with moody, relatable teen dramas set to minimalist hip-hop beats. In turn, she inspired many of the next generation of pop heavy-weights including Olivia Rodrigo, Conan Gray, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter and Troye Sivan. After Lorde's debut, the center of pop shifted to favor artists whose music reflected authenticity and vulnerability.
Lorde's ensuing albums chronicled a distinct era of her coming-of-age journey, all with a very different sound. Her latest album, Virgin, released on June 27, is a time capsule of the intense emotions and chaotic existence of being in your late 20s, complete with sharp, angular sounds and songs about disordered eating, pregnancy scares, breakups, new lovers and familial pressure.
Virgin was written and recorded primarily in 2023 in New York City with a new producer, Jim-E Stack, with whom she co-produced the project. The album was made during a major transition point in her life, as she was processing the dissolution of the romantic relationship she began at 19. She also explored her gender identity on a deeper level, prompted by binding her chest with duct tape, a striking visual she replicated in the "Man Of The Year" video.
Virgin opens with a banger of a thesis statement on "Hammer," introducing its more raucous sound while touching on her personal growth. "I might have been born again / I'm ready to feel like I don't have thе answers. / There's pеace in the madness over our heads. / Let it carry me u-u-u-u-up," she sings in the chorus, after which the music breaks into a skittering beat, as the energy slowly rises and explodes through the three-minute track.
GRAMMY.com recently caught up with Lorde from her Ultrasound arena world tour. She's open, enthusiastic and easy-to-connect with, video-calling in from a non-descript, sunny white-walled hotel room in Boston. The "Shapeshifter" discusses her sonic synchronicity with co-producer Jim-E Stack, the boundary-pushing authors she was reading while birthing Virgin, and much more.
For this tour, how have you been thinking about translating your music for such big audiences? And what has it felt like to hear your music reflected back to you?
It's definitely a different thing at that scale. It's been really interesting and cool to build a show like that.
My main takeaway about it is that it's more about [the audience] and their singing, because the audience ends up being the loudest thing in the room. It's like a chant performance; they know it encyclopedically, kind of better than I do. For me, it's as much about me coming to a show and getting to hear a really cool musical performance as it is for them, which is cool.
I think concerts are a big place where we feel our spiritual lives; that's sort of what we have now as a society.
Has there been a concert that you've been to where you had a spiritual experience?
My first concert when I was 13 was Bon Iver for his second album [2011's Bon Iver, Bon Iver], which was such a major spiritual experience. I saw Prince when I was like 16; that really rocked me. I mean, it lives in funny packages; you never know what show is gonna completely rock you, I reckon.
How did you feel before starting Virgin and how do you feel now on the other side of it, getting all those emotions out into music?
I felt very unsettled and unhappy before I made Virgin. That's why I made it, to try and ease these parts of me. I only write an album because I'm working through something big and private that I can't do without the help of my art. It sounds so goofy, but it's fully true for me. It was definitely a very raw, open couple years. My body was going through a lot of changes, and I was having to really accept my physical vulnerability and not rush past that. And now that it's out, it's given me some peace, majorly.
It's very cool performing it because I feel like all these parts of me are represented, and they all make sense together. And I play the show in just my jeans and t-shirt, they're all my clothes, which is novel for me. Normally I'd be in some kind of 'fit and there would be some separation from myself. And this is sort of the opposite; the most myself that I could be. That combined with this music is a very cool thing as an artist. I highly recommend it to other artists.
It's been 12 years since "Royals" hit No.1 on Billboard, the song that also earned you two GRAMMYs. How has the song evolved for you?
Honestly, I have always loved performing that song. It's never changed for me. I just think it's so cool. I'm so proud of baby me. It's the second song we play in the [new] arena show, and it's sick every time. I'm like, hell yeah.
It's flawed, there's a lot of complexity to a song like that being written by a middle-class teenager. I totally get it, but I'm still proud that the expression was made. I definitely know people that have very complicated relationships with their biggest material, but I'm fortunate to really like that song in all of its imperfection. It's very beautiful to me.
It must be so disorienting to have these huge moments happen when you're a teenager. How do you feel looking back at that version of yourself when you were first starting out?
I've never felt less distance from that version of myself. It's a really interesting thing starting your public catalog at that age. I'm sure everyone has complicated feelings when they look back on who they were at 16. But at the moment, I feel very connected to that young person. I think it totally works for my music, which has increasingly become about the raw impulse.
What better time to capture the raw impulse than in the most awkward of hormonal stages that we have? I highly recommend putting something out and then having to live with it, it's a very beautiful exercise of trying to love all these parts.
I can only imagine how much pressure comes with debuting with a huge hit and David Bowie saying you're "the future of music." How did it feel to have this pressure and expectation put on you at such a young age?
It's funny, I really am someone who never felt any external pressure, I was putting that on myself. I really believed in myself and felt that anything less than success [laughs] was me not doing right by myself. Now, I'm much less hard on myself. It's funny being a teenager and thinking it's pretty normal for someone to hit number one.
I think a lot of us are artists, in part, to receive the big yes from the wider world, to get mass validation and an outpouring of what can feel like love. A lot of artists work for a long time in hopes of receiving that. Receiving that very young and very early released me to do what I actually want to do. People saying, "Yes, we hear you, we get it" was so validating. Whatever that yes contains sort of freed me up to be a freak a little bit, and to follow the thread wherever I gotta follow it, which is all over the place. It all happens exactly as it's meant to I think. I wouldn't trade careers with anyone. I absolutely love everything about my journey.
That's so beautiful that even at a young age, you were like, Okay, I did it, now I can do what I want.
It was tough though, I won't lie. Making Melodrama was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I really felt the pressure then. I didn't know if people were gonna like it, but I knew I had no choice, I had to make what I was gonna make. I freaked out for sure.
Let's go back to Virgin. How do you feel that you stretched yourself sonically and lyrically on the album and what did that process feel like for you?
It was a really important part of Virgin going in, I knew that I wanted to push myself lyrically. I was reading a lot of authors — including Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner and Elizabeth Hardwick — who I think really go to the edge in their work, and I felt the power of that. The impetus for starting the album really was to feel like I'm right on the edge with what I'm saying. As with anything that really stretches you, it's painful while it's happening, and then you have all this extra room to move. I really feel that now. I feel like I am more my age.
The cool thing about pop music is the inbuilt collective nature of what you're doing. I never lose sight of the fact that this is a medium for a lot of people. So for me, when I'm having the feeling that I know is so specific but so universal — of taking a pregnancy test and all these thoughts and feelings flooding my mind in the two minutes it takes to process — how come I don't have a piece of art that is about this feeling? Knowing the number of friends I have that would also get something out of that piece of art, that's a pop song to me. It's cool to keep slightly stretching the definitions of those things. Something like that doesn't feel radical at all to me, but I'm like, I don't have that anywhere in my catalog, in my phone, that I could listen to if I needed to.
What about stretching with the production? I loved how there was a lot of clanging and sharp edges to bring feelings out in you as the listener. How did working with Jim-E Stack allow you to be more vulnerable lyrically as well as explore edgier sounds?
We talked a lot about how I was really trying to describe my femininity, which is really specific to me and varied and a product of all these different influences and experiences. There was an intensity to it that I really wanted to harness and not shy away from, and a plainness as well. "Royals" is such a cool North Star in that there's like three sounds. I'm sort of minimalist at my core. There's no better drum programmer than Jim-E. But he's also interested in making stuff out of pretty raw sounds. Obviously, we finished everything meticulously, but he doesn't try to overly polish [songs]. That was so perfect for where I was at.
He was going back and forth between Virgin and SABLE, fABLE, the Bon Iver album. He would come back from Wisconsin and be in even more of a raw place with whatever beat we were making. We were perfectly matched, really. We work well as co-producers, we have a very similar frame of reference. We were raised on the same electronic music, hip-hop, R&B, pop, there's a lot of commonality there. And even putting a beat together, which is so personal — you're like, the kick has to go there — we really were very aligned. I have some very fond memories of constructing songs like "GRWM" or "Man Of The Year," standing next to each other at the computer and going over the beat with a fine-tooth comb. We were very psyched.
What are some of those music references you both grew up on?
Drake. [Giggles.] We both have encyclopedic Drake knowledge. Even something like Burial or Jai Paul or the SoundCloud hype machine era of electronic music. I'm trying to think of the big, common references… a surprising amount of Drake.
I love the sample and interpolation of Baby Bash's 2003 hit "Suga Suga" on "If She Could See Me Now." At what point did that idea come through?
I just sang that into the mic the first day I wrote that song. I wrote it with Fabiana Palladino, an amazing British artist and a songwriter. We were in West London at XL Studio and I was just f—ing around. It was this expression of something very carefree and playful.
I love that song, I was raised on it. It's a perfect melody. So, it was always kind of a non-negotiable for me that it was in the song. It's been part of it forever. They were down. It's subtle because it's not a sample, it's me humming. I love it. It's a very sick part of Virgin.
There's also some great lyrics on "If She Could See Me Now," like "I bring the pain out the synthesizer / The bodies move like there's spirits inside 'em." What sounds and rhythms feel the most cathartic to you, and how did you work and play with them on Virgin?
There were a few. Jim-E's drums always have that feeling to me, across this whole album, they really release something about these stories. Buddy Ross played a lot of really beautiful, super singular synth parts for us that really feel like the soul of Virgin.
Andrew Aged, who is a really amazing guitarist, came and played on six or seven songs. Because the album is a lot of machines, Andrew came in with his guitar and destroyed me and reminded me what's possible with original instruments. Those are definitely the big pillars sound-wise on Virgin. It's so cool getting to hear it on the PA; I'm like, Oh yeah, this is my perfect cusp of 29 art for me.
What music do you tend to listen to when you need to get s— out? Is it dance music or is it more lyrical?
Good question. It's definitely gonna be something with a strong rhythm… the Prodigy. What have I been listening to lately? It is all over the place. You go to the Midwest and all of a sudden, you're like, I need to listen to [San Jose, California indie rock band] Duster. I've been loving [alt-R&B singer/songwriter] Dijon's [2025] album so much. My true addiction actually and the most cathartic is [experimental electro-pop producer and rapper]2hollis.