Latest news with #BloodOrange
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lorde Performs ‘Virgin' in Full at Surprise Glastonbury Set
Lorde celebrated the release of Virgin by performing the entire album live for the first time at a surprise, early-morning set at Glastonbury. The musician confirmed the set Thursday night and took the stage at 11:30 a.m. Friday, with a very full crowd there to meet her, despite such little notice and the non-traditional time slot. (Per the BBC, so many people showed up that Glastonbury had to close access to the Woodsies field due to overcrowding concerns.) More from Rolling Stone Lorde's Fourth Album 'Virgin' Is Finally Here Glastonbury 2025 Livestream: How to Watch Sets From Olivia Rodrigo to Noah Kahan Online Lorde Is Brilliantly Reborn on 'Virgin' Lorde kicked off her set with 'Hammer' and proceeded to play the rest of Virgin straight through, giving each song its live debut. She then ended the set with two longtime favorites, 'Ribs' and 'Green Light.' At one point during the performance, Lorde thanked fans for showing up. 'We decided to play the whole record for you from front to back,' Lorde said. 'This may be a one-of-one, you know? This record took me a lot. I didn't know if I'd make another record, to be honest, but I'm back here completely free. And I'm so grateful to you for waiting.' Virgin marks Lorde's fourth album and first since 2021's Solar Power. She wrote and produced the record with Jim-E Stack, while additional contributors include Dev Hynes (a.k.a. Blood Orange), Dan Nigro, and Fabiana Palladino. As Lorde discussed in her recent Rolling Stone cover story, most of the album was written from late 2023 through 2024, between London and New York. Work on the album began after a transformative period of self-discovery, after recovering from an eating disorder and processing the end of a long-term relationship. She described the period that followed as 'the ooze,' during which she allowed herself to take up more space — physically, creatively, emotionally — and explore the expansiveness of her gender expression. Describing the physicality of the album, Lorde said, 'I think coming more into my body, I came into an understanding of the grotesque nature of it and the glory and all these things. It's right on the edge of gross. I often really tried to hit this kind of gnarliness or grossness. 'You tasted my underwear.' I've never heard that in a song, you know? It felt like the right way to tell this whole chapter.' Lorde will hit the road later this year in support of Virgin. The North American leg of the trek kicks off Sept. 17 in Austin and wraps Oct. 22 in Seattle. Lorde will be joined by Blood Orange, Japanese House, Chanel Beads, and Empress Of on select dates. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lorde Says MDMA Therapy ‘Changed the Game' on Her Stage Fright
Lorde is opening up about how MDMA therapy helped her overcome debilitating stage fright, crediting the treatment with changing her relationship with live performance entirely. During an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the pop star candidly discussed how she once suffered from 'truly the most horrific stage fright' that dated back to her early childhood in community theatre. When Colbert asked how she got past it, Lorde didn't hold back. 'Well, it's MDMA therapy,' she said. 'Truly, like, changed the game on my stage fright.' More from Billboard Carín León, Kapo, Netón Vega, Myke Towers, Laura Pausini & More Set for Billboard Latin Music Week 2025 Whitney Houston's 'The Bodyguard' Extends Its Lead as the Highest RIAA-Certified Soundtrack of All Time Shania Twain Stars in New Commercial for Clearly Canadian Sparkling Water: 'It's Pure Nostalgia in a Bottle' Lorde explained how the treatment worked for her when other forms of healing hadn't. 'Some of these things live very deep in the body, and you hold on to it,' she said. 'You hold on to a response like stage fright for reasons that no amount of talk therapy or brain use could get at. But when you bypass that and get to the body, something shifts. And that totally happened for me.' After trying 'everything' for her anxiety around performing, Lorde said she woke up the day after her MDMA therapy and instantly felt the shift: 'I was like, oh, it's over. I know it's over.' The revelation comes as Lorde gears up for the release of her new album Virgin, out June 27 via Republic Records. She recently dropped the final pre-release single 'Hammer' on June 20. The euphoric track, co-produced by Jim-E Stack, opens the album and has drawn comparisons to Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face' for its glitchy, electro-pop flair. Lorde described 'Hammer' as 'an ode to city life and horniness tbh' and has promised that Virgin will explore themes of rebirth, gender, spiritual transformation, and bodily autonomy. The album also includes production from Fabiana Palladino, Dan Nigro, Buddy Ross and Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, among others. She's been open about how her recent life changes influenced the record, from quitting birth control and experiencing disordered eating to ending a long-term relationship. The project's rawness is reflected in its visual aesthetic as well: 'The colour of the album is clear,' she wrote when announcing it. 'Like bathwater, windows, ice, spit. Full transparency.' Virgin is out Friday, June 27, with a Renell Medrano-directed video for 'Hammer' arriving the same day. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
Time of India
a day ago
- Politics
- Time of India
'Pretty gay, dude': Trump's 'daddy' shirt ignites firestorm as MAGA world explodes, triggers massive backlash
The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is facing an identity crisis after Donald Trump's campaign fundraising arm is now selling T-shirts with the President's mugshot and the word "DADDY" emblazoned on the front. The shirt, which is available for a mere $35 plus a donation to Trump's foundation, has left many MAGA faithful furious. The T-shirts were up for sale after White House embraced the nickname used by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to describe the president earlier this week. 'THEY'RE CALLING ME DADDY!' the president wrote through a Trump National Committee Joint Fundraising Committee message on Thursday. 'When Biden was President, we were LAUGHED at on the world stage. The whole world WALKED ALL OVER US!' the message said. 'But thanks to your favorite President (ME!) we are respected once again,' the message added. 'Moments ago, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called me DADDY on the world stage. How nice!' ALSO READ: On camera: Pete Hegseth explodes at Fox News journalist and ex-colleague, says 'you're about the worst' Live Events Trump campaign selling 'Daddy' T-shirts The T-shirt features Donald Trump's booking photo from Georgia, where the president and his allies are criminally charged with racketeering and conspiring to overturn 2020 election results in the state. The shirt is available in sizes up to XXL in a striking Blood Orange hue. But the T-shirt has sparked outrage among some of Trump's conservative supporters who perceive it as being too pro-LGBTQ. The MAGA movement is facing an identity crisis after Donald Trump's team unveiled a new line of T-shirts featuring the word "Daddy" alongside a picture of the former president. The $27 shirt, available in sizes up to XXL in a striking Blood Orange hue, has sparked outrage among some of Trump's conservative supporters who perceive it as being too pro-LGBTQ. Some online commenters have voiced their discontent with the merchandise: "So we have now become the party of sexual degenerates and glorifying deviant sexual fetishes. Great," one critic remarked. Another bluntly stated, "This is pretty gay dude," while a third questioned, "I thought MAGA was against Pride Month,". ALSO READ: Indian-origin Zohran Mamdani faces shocking threat to US citizenship: Can Trump really deport him? On the other hand, some people poked fun at the situation: "MAGA try to go 5 minutes without being super homosexual challenge [ IMPOSSIBLE ] ((NEVER COMPLETED! ! ))," one joked. "MAGA Celebrates Pride Month," another quipped. A third person chuckled, "Trump is the GOAT at being able to make money on trolling people. Love it," while a fourth playfully declared, "MAGA is officially gay," Trump 'DADDY' nickname The development comes after White House posted a video on its official Instagram handle that shows Trump returning to Washington after the NATO summit in The Hague, set to Usher's 2010 song 'Hey Daddy (Daddy's Home).' NATO chief Rutte jokingly referred to Trump as 'daddy' during a sit-down in front of the assembled press as they discussed the conflict between Israel and Iran. ALSO READ: Zohran Mamdani called 'Hamas sympathizer' in Islamophobic attack, Trump ally says 'there will be another 9/11 in NYC' The Trump administration has been rolling with the punches after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte referred to Trump as "daddy" during the recent summit. Even after Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, the missiles kept coming, causing Trump to lash out with some harsh words for both nations. 'We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f*** they're doing, do you understand that?' Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before setting off for the summit in the Netherlands. ALSO READ: Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sanchez secret wedding bombshell: Unexpected mega-million prenup and A-list guests snubbed At the summit, Trump told the press: 'They've got a big fight, like two kids in a schoolyard. You know, they fight like hell. You can't stop them, let them fight for two, three minutes, then it's easier to stop them…' 'And then daddy has to, sometimes, use strong language,' Rutte added. 'Strong language, yeah, every once in a while,' Trump replied. Trump was asked about the interaction and if it suggested that he viewed other countries as 'children.' 'He likes me. If he doesn't, I'll let you know, I'll come back, and I'll hit him hard,' Trump responded. 'He did it very affectionately. 'Daddy, you're my daddy.''
Sydney Morning Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Girl, so revealing: Lorde lets it all out
Lorde is standing in the middle of a Sydney dance floor, eyes closed, elated. And why wouldn't she be elated? She's surrounded by wide-eyed, adoring fans at the CBD venue Mary's Underground, which is currently throwing a club night dedicated to her music. Her appearance is a complete surprise to attendees, and blurry social media footage captured the amusing moment fans turn and realise the woman brushing past them in the crowd is the real Ella Yelich-O'Connor. Lorde isn't just there to hang up the back, and she joyfully throws herself amongst fans on the dance floor, briefly jumping behind the DJ decks to sing along to her hits. She was having such a good time that a spokesperson for Mary's Underground later told The Guardian that she 'almost refused to leave when her management were trying to usher her out'. 'It was so incredible, it was so sweet,' Lorde tells me a day after the festivities. 'These kids are so amazing… I could have watched them for hours, there was something so moving to me [about it]. It's one thing that it was my music, but I just find seeing people having shared experiences through pop music incredibly moving. It's a very special art form in that a whole bunch of people are brought together and something quite spiritual and physical happens in a club underground. It's so cool.' It's a bright and beautifully clear late-autumn day, and Lorde and I are sitting in a quiet boardroom at the Eve Hotel in Redfern. It's curiously plonked right next to the rooftop pool area, which is a wash of deep reds, oranges, and blindingly white stone. When I remark to Lorde that this complex used to be (somewhat) fondly known by Sydneysiders as 'Murder Mall', she laughs. 'Yes, I heard about Murder Mall!' she says. 'It's crazy to be staying in Redfern at this stage of its evolution.' Gentrification? 'Gentrification… exactly,' she says dryly, filling up a couple of water glasses on the long table. The New Zealand singer isn't just in town to crash her own parties or survey the new Harris Farm, but rather to chat about her highly anticipated fourth album, Virgin. The promotional run for the album has been marked by frenetic fan gatherings and pop-ups – most notably the launch of the album's first single What Was That. In April, Lorde had put the call-out to fans to head to Manhattan's Washington Square Park to hear the new single, but police quickly shut it down after the park became overcrowded. The singer still rocked up a few hours later, playing the song through some portable speakers assembled by her producer Dev Hynes (Blood Orange). Lorde stood on a small wooden platform in front of them, dancing to the screams of the crowd. It's also been a time of revelation and openness, with Lorde talking at length in interviews and to her fans about her shifting gender identity, past struggles with disordered eating and body image, and the dissolution of her long-term relationship. These are some of the skeletons unearthed on Virgin. No one is 'sort of' a fan of me. It's like you've got a tattoo, or you don't know who I am. 'I feel very alive in talking about it,' Lorde says slowly and carefully, her large grey eyes fixing on various points around the room. 'It is scary and vulnerable. It's one thing getting up against something difficult in a work of art in private, and then keeping it alive via talking and going back over it. 'Going into this album I had the sense that something very raw and close to the bone was wanting to come out of me, and that it would touch on all of these uncomfortable places and maybe even be a little bit violent,' she says. 'I often felt uncomfortable making this album. I basically felt uncomfortable the whole time. When you're pushing yourself to the bone, or [pushing] to only tell the truth… the only way I can think to describe it is that it makes you feel very alive.' Lorde mentions a moment at the end of 2023 – 'a hard, hard, hard year… a lot of structures were coming down around me' – when she wrote a newsletter to fans that detailed some of her inner turmoil. She received a wave of support and love in response, and it took the air out of the pain. 'I'm finding it's a similar thing now,' she explains. 'As soon as I said 'I'm really not feeling right in my body. All these things aren't right', it was like, oh, that's okay. It set something right in my brain where I felt like, 'Okay, now I can push on and become who I'm supposed to become'.' Lorde picks through her sentences slowly, often absent-mindedly spinning the ring on her finger that's stamped with the letter 'E'. Despite the intensity of the subject matter, she's quick to laugh – at one point early in our chat she ducks outside to fondly scold her security guard for talking too loudly ('he's been with me 10 years, that's how we talk to each other'). Dressed in simple black pants and a grey button-up, she's relaxed as we pick through the pieces of the last few years. Writing for Virgin stretches back a few years, but the ball started rolling in 2023 when she jumped into a New York studio with producer and writer Jim-E Stack. Her last two records – 2017's masterpiece Melodrama, and 2021's delicate and under-performing Solar Power – had been created with ubiquitous pop wizard Jack Antonoff; Lorde said recently it was just time to shake things up and move ahead. Where Solar Power was ornate and breezy, Virgin is abrasive and direct. In the songwriting and the production, Lorde was gripped by an obsession to peel back the layers, to be as raw and truthful as possible, even when it felt unbearable. 'It was an effort to get to this extreme plainness,' she says. 'And just let what was happening be what made it beautiful. I was reading a lot of [French writer] Annie Ernaux… she's unsentimental. I was interested in female voices that were unsentimental while still being incredibly emotive and generous and loving. 'Once I started writing like that, it started feeling like a Virgin song,' she says. 'In the production, I had this thing where I kept saying, 'I want to see the wires'. My music has always been machine-made. I've always used synths and programmed drums, but I wanted to feel the machines for what they were, not trying to make them sound softer than they are. I was like, 'the machines are the machines and the bodies are the bodies'.' There's a lot of body on this album, from the slaps of percussion that sound like skin on skin, to visuals of bodily fluids and masturbation, to the beats that underscore songs like Shapeshifter that sound like eerie thumps of a heart. 'I tried hard to bypass my brain and get at the physicality of a song, and the percussion and rhythmic language is a great way of doing that,' Lorde says. 'The whole album to me is about being very close to, or inside, the body.' Lorde came off birth control in 2023, which pitched her headlong into surges of emotional highs and lows. 'I've always had acne, but all of a sudden I had capital A acne,' she recalls. 'There's something about your vulnerability being so externalised. You have no choice but to be who you are because there's no hiding the violent processes happening inside your body.' She also felt, for the first time, a broadening of her gender identity, something which is flagged on the album's opening track, Hammer: 'Some days I'm a woman/Some days I'm a man'. Man of the Year explores this more deeply, and the accompanying video sees Lorde roughly taping down her breasts with duct tape. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Lorde recalled fellow pop star Chappell Roan asking her bluntly, 'So are you nonbinary now?' . When I mention this, Lorde throws her head back and laughs. 'Okay, I might've misquoted her there,' Lorde clarifies. 'I think she said, 'Are you changing your pronouns?'' Lorde still uses she/her pronouns and identifies as a cis woman, but she's comfortable in her fluidity. She also stresses, earnestly, that while she feels a little scared about discussing it, it's 'not even a fraction, a hair, of what trans kids go through'. 'It's such a mirror,' she says, about the public's reaction. 'I know that with things like gender it can be a lifelong journey, but I know who I am right now and so I feel quite clear… I think depending on how you feel about uncertainty or impermanence or just any movement pertaining to gender or any widening pertaining to gender, I think it's on you.' In many ways, Virgin feels like the spiritual successor to Melodrama – an album that was also defined by wild emotion. Featuring some of Lorde's biggest and best songs, like Green Light and the heart-cracking Liability, it's a beloved cult favourite among pop fans. 'It's such a unique relationship,' Lorde says after a time, when I ask what she feels about the intense relationship fans have with her music, and whether it's ever restrictive. 'I feel so lucky to have the degree of emotional buy-in that people have to my work, and I take it so seriously,' she continues. 'I also at times need to turn away from that to make things. I think it's an [painter] Agnes Martin thing where she says, 'I make with my back to the world'. 'Also, and I've certainly had this experience as a fan, sometimes you don't know what you need, and then it happens. There might be a period of disconnect, confusion… but I think in choosing someone, it's a bit like a relationship. You choose to go on this journey in your lives together and sort of be with the zigs and zags.' She's always enriched by fan interactions, she adds. 'No one is 'sort of' a fan of me. It's like you've got a tattoo, or you don't know who I am. I just hold these kids and they are in my arms, like last night, and I feel them breathing or sobbing. It's indescribably precious to me.' There's another recent, key inspiration for Lorde: Charli XCX's lurid and ground-breaking album Brat. For Lorde, watching an artist who has traversed the mainstream and the underground finally bring it all together and arrive at a fully realised artistic statement was incredible. The attention to detail, the dedication to vision, pushed Lorde and gave her faith that there would be an appetite for her own examination of femininity. Then there was Girl, So Confusing, the song in which Charli had questioned her friendship with a fellow artist 'with the same hair' (that is, Lorde). Charli gave Lorde the heads-up about the song by sending her a voice memo, and soon after Lorde recorded a verse for the remix, reflecting on her part in their friendship – and also opening up about being 'at war in my body'. It was, arguably, the biggest pop moment of the year, and a stunning moment of generosity from both artists. 'Charli was like, 'This is going to be massive',' Lorde says now, chuckling, after politely asking her publicist if we could have some more time to chat. 'For me, before it had even come out, what had been achieved between the two of us was so profound. She had opened the channel for this dialogue to happen, and I had to be like, 'Okay, deep breath, be brave, be vulnerable. Give her that part of you'.' Lorde describes Virgin as having the colour of 'clear'. It's immediately evident in the album cover – an X-ray of Lorde's pelvis that shows a zipper, belt-buckle, and a small IUD floating in ice blue. Loading 'I was just coming off birth control… The pregnancy test made a reemergence in my life – another kind of intimate technology,' Lorde says. 'I had some health stuff going on and I was getting ultrasounds and I just had this feeling that ultrasounds and X-rays… It felt like an image that I hadn't seen. I truly just did want to see myself all the way. Like, what's at the root?' She pauses for a moment. 'I'm not even allowed to say where we took the X-rays because it's very illegal to take recreational X-rays in most countries,' she laughs, as her publicist knocks gently on the door again. 'But we took these images of my whole body and I was like, 'I think that's it'. It's me at this exact stage of life, this deep purity, my genes, and my IUD. I was like, 'I think that's who made this album.''
The Age
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Girl, so revealing: Lorde lets it all out
Lorde is standing in the middle of a Sydney dance floor, eyes closed, elated. And why wouldn't she be elated? She's surrounded by wide-eyed, adoring fans at the CBD venue Mary's Underground, which is currently throwing a club night dedicated to her music. Her appearance is a complete surprise to attendees, and blurry social media footage captured the amusing moment fans turn and realise the woman brushing past them in the crowd is the real Ella Yelich-O'Connor. Lorde isn't just there to hang up the back, and she joyfully throws herself amongst fans on the dance floor, briefly jumping behind the DJ decks to sing along to her hits. She was having such a good time that a spokesperson for Mary's Underground later told The Guardian that she 'almost refused to leave when her management were trying to usher her out'. 'It was so incredible, it was so sweet,' Lorde tells me a day after the festivities. 'These kids are so amazing… I could have watched them for hours, there was something so moving to me [about it]. It's one thing that it was my music, but I just find seeing people having shared experiences through pop music incredibly moving. It's a very special art form in that a whole bunch of people are brought together and something quite spiritual and physical happens in a club underground. It's so cool.' It's a bright and beautifully clear late-autumn day, and Lorde and I are sitting in a quiet boardroom at the Eve Hotel in Redfern. It's curiously plonked right next to the rooftop pool area, which is a wash of deep reds, oranges, and blindingly white stone. When I remark to Lorde that this complex used to be (somewhat) fondly known by Sydneysiders as 'Murder Mall', she laughs. 'Yes, I heard about Murder Mall!' she says. 'It's crazy to be staying in Redfern at this stage of its evolution.' Gentrification? 'Gentrification… exactly,' she says dryly, filling up a couple of water glasses on the long table. The New Zealand singer isn't just in town to crash her own parties or survey the new Harris Farm, but rather to chat about her highly anticipated fourth album, Virgin. The promotional run for the album has been marked by frenetic fan gatherings and pop-ups – most notably the launch of the album's first single What Was That. In April, Lorde had put the call-out to fans to head to Manhattan's Washington Square Park to hear the new single, but police quickly shut it down after the park became overcrowded. The singer still rocked up a few hours later, playing the song through some portable speakers assembled by her producer Dev Hynes (Blood Orange). Lorde stood on a small wooden platform in front of them, dancing to the screams of the crowd. It's also been a time of revelation and openness, with Lorde talking at length in interviews and to her fans about her shifting gender identity, past struggles with disordered eating and body image, and the dissolution of her long-term relationship. These are some of the skeletons unearthed on Virgin. No one is 'sort of' a fan of me. It's like you've got a tattoo, or you don't know who I am. 'I feel very alive in talking about it,' Lorde says slowly and carefully, her large grey eyes fixing on various points around the room. 'It is scary and vulnerable. It's one thing getting up against something difficult in a work of art in private, and then keeping it alive via talking and going back over it. 'Going into this album I had the sense that something very raw and close to the bone was wanting to come out of me, and that it would touch on all of these uncomfortable places and maybe even be a little bit violent,' she says. 'I often felt uncomfortable making this album. I basically felt uncomfortable the whole time. When you're pushing yourself to the bone, or [pushing] to only tell the truth… the only way I can think to describe it is that it makes you feel very alive.' Lorde mentions a moment at the end of 2023 – 'a hard, hard, hard year… a lot of structures were coming down around me' – when she wrote a newsletter to fans that detailed some of her inner turmoil. She received a wave of support and love in response, and it took the air out of the pain. 'I'm finding it's a similar thing now,' she explains. 'As soon as I said 'I'm really not feeling right in my body. All these things aren't right', it was like, oh, that's okay. It set something right in my brain where I felt like, 'Okay, now I can push on and become who I'm supposed to become'.' Lorde picks through her sentences slowly, often absent-mindedly spinning the ring on her finger that's stamped with the letter 'E'. Despite the intensity of the subject matter, she's quick to laugh – at one point early in our chat she ducks outside to fondly scold her security guard for talking too loudly ('he's been with me 10 years, that's how we talk to each other'). Dressed in simple black pants and a grey button-up, she's relaxed as we pick through the pieces of the last few years. Writing for Virgin stretches back a few years, but the ball started rolling in 2023 when she jumped into a New York studio with producer and writer Jim-E Stack. Her last two records – 2017's masterpiece Melodrama, and 2021's delicate and under-performing Solar Power – had been created with ubiquitous pop wizard Jack Antonoff; Lorde said recently it was just time to shake things up and move ahead. Where Solar Power was ornate and breezy, Virgin is abrasive and direct. In the songwriting and the production, Lorde was gripped by an obsession to peel back the layers, to be as raw and truthful as possible, even when it felt unbearable. 'It was an effort to get to this extreme plainness,' she says. 'And just let what was happening be what made it beautiful. I was reading a lot of [French writer] Annie Ernaux… she's unsentimental. I was interested in female voices that were unsentimental while still being incredibly emotive and generous and loving. 'Once I started writing like that, it started feeling like a Virgin song,' she says. 'In the production, I had this thing where I kept saying, 'I want to see the wires'. My music has always been machine-made. I've always used synths and programmed drums, but I wanted to feel the machines for what they were, not trying to make them sound softer than they are. I was like, 'the machines are the machines and the bodies are the bodies'.' There's a lot of body on this album, from the slaps of percussion that sound like skin on skin, to visuals of bodily fluids and masturbation, to the beats that underscore songs like Shapeshifter that sound like eerie thumps of a heart. 'I tried hard to bypass my brain and get at the physicality of a song, and the percussion and rhythmic language is a great way of doing that,' Lorde says. 'The whole album to me is about being very close to, or inside, the body.' Lorde came off birth control in 2023, which pitched her headlong into surges of emotional highs and lows. 'I've always had acne, but all of a sudden I had capital A acne,' she recalls. 'There's something about your vulnerability being so externalised. You have no choice but to be who you are because there's no hiding the violent processes happening inside your body.' She also felt, for the first time, a broadening of her gender identity, something which is flagged on the album's opening track, Hammer: 'Some days I'm a woman/Some days I'm a man'. Man of the Year explores this more deeply, and the accompanying video sees Lorde roughly taping down her breasts with duct tape. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Lorde recalled fellow pop star Chappell Roan asking her bluntly, 'So are you nonbinary now?' . When I mention this, Lorde throws her head back and laughs. 'Okay, I might've misquoted her there,' Lorde clarifies. 'I think she said, 'Are you changing your pronouns?'' Lorde still uses she/her pronouns and identifies as a cis woman, but she's comfortable in her fluidity. She also stresses, earnestly, that while she feels a little scared about discussing it, it's 'not even a fraction, a hair, of what trans kids go through'. 'It's such a mirror,' she says, about the public's reaction. 'I know that with things like gender it can be a lifelong journey, but I know who I am right now and so I feel quite clear… I think depending on how you feel about uncertainty or impermanence or just any movement pertaining to gender or any widening pertaining to gender, I think it's on you.' In many ways, Virgin feels like the spiritual successor to Melodrama – an album that was also defined by wild emotion. Featuring some of Lorde's biggest and best songs, like Green Light and the heart-cracking Liability, it's a beloved cult favourite among pop fans. 'It's such a unique relationship,' Lorde says after a time, when I ask what she feels about the intense relationship fans have with her music, and whether it's ever restrictive. 'I feel so lucky to have the degree of emotional buy-in that people have to my work, and I take it so seriously,' she continues. 'I also at times need to turn away from that to make things. I think it's an [painter] Agnes Martin thing where she says, 'I make with my back to the world'. 'Also, and I've certainly had this experience as a fan, sometimes you don't know what you need, and then it happens. There might be a period of disconnect, confusion… but I think in choosing someone, it's a bit like a relationship. You choose to go on this journey in your lives together and sort of be with the zigs and zags.' She's always enriched by fan interactions, she adds. 'No one is 'sort of' a fan of me. It's like you've got a tattoo, or you don't know who I am. I just hold these kids and they are in my arms, like last night, and I feel them breathing or sobbing. It's indescribably precious to me.' There's another recent, key inspiration for Lorde: Charli XCX's lurid and ground-breaking album Brat. For Lorde, watching an artist who has traversed the mainstream and the underground finally bring it all together and arrive at a fully realised artistic statement was incredible. The attention to detail, the dedication to vision, pushed Lorde and gave her faith that there would be an appetite for her own examination of femininity. Then there was Girl, So Confusing, the song in which Charli had questioned her friendship with a fellow artist 'with the same hair' (that is, Lorde). Charli gave Lorde the heads-up about the song by sending her a voice memo, and soon after Lorde recorded a verse for the remix, reflecting on her part in their friendship – and also opening up about being 'at war in my body'. It was, arguably, the biggest pop moment of the year, and a stunning moment of generosity from both artists. 'Charli was like, 'This is going to be massive',' Lorde says now, chuckling, after politely asking her publicist if we could have some more time to chat. 'For me, before it had even come out, what had been achieved between the two of us was so profound. She had opened the channel for this dialogue to happen, and I had to be like, 'Okay, deep breath, be brave, be vulnerable. Give her that part of you'.' Lorde describes Virgin as having the colour of 'clear'. It's immediately evident in the album cover – an X-ray of Lorde's pelvis that shows a zipper, belt-buckle, and a small IUD floating in ice blue. Loading 'I was just coming off birth control… The pregnancy test made a reemergence in my life – another kind of intimate technology,' Lorde says. 'I had some health stuff going on and I was getting ultrasounds and I just had this feeling that ultrasounds and X-rays… It felt like an image that I hadn't seen. I truly just did want to see myself all the way. Like, what's at the root?' She pauses for a moment. 'I'm not even allowed to say where we took the X-rays because it's very illegal to take recreational X-rays in most countries,' she laughs, as her publicist knocks gently on the door again. 'But we took these images of my whole body and I was like, 'I think that's it'. It's me at this exact stage of life, this deep purity, my genes, and my IUD. I was like, 'I think that's who made this album.''
