A hot late-summer breeze blows across a Burbank parking lot as Lorde sits beneath a tattered canopy outside the rehearsal studio where she’s preparing for her latest world tour.
The 28-year-old singer and songwriter from New Zealand has been here for 10 days figuring out how to bring her album “Virgin” to the stage; in a few hours, she’ll fly home to New York for a friend’s wedding before heading to Austin, Texas, for the tour’s opening date.
First, though: one final run-through of the show with the dancers she’s recruited to complement her own movement, which she describes as “quite wild and difficult to corral.” To ready her body, she ordered in Japanese last night, then had somebody administer an IV vitamin drip as she thumbed through an issue of the New Yorker.
“Real pop-star behavior,” she says with a laugh. “The IV comes to me.”
Born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, Lorde broke out at age 16 with “Royals,” her stark and whispery debut single — “a speech barely scaffolded with melody,” she calls it now — about the illusory satisfactions of a consumer culture run amok. “Royals” topped Billboard’s Hot 100 for nine straight weeks in 2013 and went on to win two Grammys, including the award for song of the year.
It also set a template for much of the brooding pop music to come over the next decade from the likes of Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, the latter of whom recently told Rolling Stone that she doesn’t know “any modern songwriters who haven’t been influenced by her.”
Yet by 2021’s “Solar Power,” Lorde was singing about abandoning the hurly-burly of pop stardom in the always-on social-media era. “I throw my cellular device in the water,” she cooed blissfully in the LP’s strummy title track, “Can you reach me? No, you can’t.”
“Virgin,” which came out in June, finds her inching back into the fray. Streaked with harsh if alluring electronic textures Lorde created with her co-producer Jim-E Stack, it’s the work of a woman attempting to make room for her whole self — her complicated body image, her varied sexual appetites, her evolving gender identity — within the constricting reality of female celebrity.
Indeed, as she was making the record last year, Lorde had her most scrutinized pop-cultural moment in ages when Charli XCX invited her to appear on a remix of her song “Girl, So Confusing.” The original, from Charli’s 2024 “Brat” album, didn’t name Lorde but was widely interpreted as being about the hot-and-cold relationship between the two singers.
“It’s a very unique feeling to have someone write a song about you,” Lorde says before her dance rehearsal. “I don’t think I’d ever had that before, and I’d written so many songs about other people.”
Dressed in baggy jeans and a billowy linen shirt, she sips a green juice as a takeout bag from Sqirl sits next to her on a picnic table. (“Some sort of macro bowl,” she says of the food.) Her wavy brown hair hangs loose around her face, and she wears a ring embossed with an “E” that her grandmother Elsa gave her when she was young.
“I came to the conclusion that any song that gets written about you is a love song,” she continues. “It’s an act of love to use your gift to see someone.”
In the “Girl, So Confusing” remix, which exploded immediately online, Lorde tells Charli that the reason she’d always cancel on their plans is because she’d “been at war with my body” — “I tried to starve myself thinner,” she adds — and was “scared to be in your pictures.”
Why reveal something so personal on someone else’s record? Lorde shrugs. “It felt like what the moment called for. I was definitely in the soup already,” she says, writing songs for “Virgin” — “dropping all guard and being radically transparent,” as she puts it. “I just wanted to lay it all very bare.”
Says Stack, who’s also worked with Bon Iver and Gracie Abrams: “I think it was a moment where Ella had no choice but to walk the walk.”
Still, the honesty of “Girl, So Confusing” hit Lorde the day after it came out. “I was like, This is pretty … close. But that was a perfect experience for me as an artist,” she says. “It gave me a lot of faith in the endeavor.”
Affirmed by the reaction to the remix — she and Charli broke the internet again when they performed the track live at Madison Square Garden and at Coachella — Lorde burrowed deeper into the uncomfortable truths she wanted to express on “Virgin.”
The album opens with “Hammer,” in which she sings, “Some days, I’m a woman / Some days, I’m a man” over a strobing synth lick; it’s a theme she revisits in “Man of the Year,” whose music video shows Lorde pulling off a white T-shirt then binding her breasts with strips of duct tape.
In “Favourite Daughter” she contemplates her tricky relationship with her mother, in “Broken Glass” her history with disordered eating; “GRWM” exults in the sexual freedom to be had after the kind of breakup Lorde went through in 2023, when she split from the record-exec boyfriend she’d been with since around 2015.
Asked to name her favorite lyric on the LP, she doesn’t hesitate. “‘I rode you till I cried,’” she says, quoting a line from “Clearblue,” in which she recalls a pregnancy scare in vivid detail.
“Who else is putting that in a pop song?” she says, grinning.
Sonically, Lorde and Stack sought what she calls a “primal” energy in the music; she was constantly pushing to peel back more layers of the sound.
“Look at ‘Man of the Year,’” Stack says. “At the top it’s literally one note on bass and her vocal. That’s, like, scary raw.”
Lorde’s Ultrasound tour, which launched in mid-September and will stop Oct. 18 at Inglewood’s Kia Forum, carries that rawness into arenas with a bracingly minimalist production built around her performance.
“Since ‘Solar Power,’ I’ve made a concerted effort in my work to try and strip away any decorative elements,” the singer says in Burbank as she puts the finishing touches on the show. “I’m really into plainness.”
For the first time, she plans to wear jeans onstage; her merch, she points out, uses the basic Times New Roman font. “The less the better,” she says. “Then the idea transfers.”
The no-frills approach has made it difficult to integrate some of her older work, particularly the ornate psych-folk tunes from “Solar Power.” Yet Lorde views it as her duty as a performer to “bring all these parts of myself forward,” she says — even the songs that seem now like vestiges of a different life.
“‘Buzzcut Season,’ I think I was almost 15 when I wrote that,” she says of the track from her 2013 debut, “Pure Heroine.” “I hear this baby in the backing vocals.”
Do any of her old songs feel beyond reach at this point?
“Absolutely,” she replies.
Such as?
“Nope,” she says, laughing as she declines to specify — though she notes that she’s not referring to anything in the show. “I can’t play it if I can’t get there.”
Before her previous tour, in 2022, Lorde underwent MDMA and psilocybin therapy as a way of dealing with her longstanding stage fright. Today she says she hasn’t done MDMA since then but has continued with psilocybin, which she hopes to do for the rest of her life.
“Once a year having this transformative wipeout and getting all this new information — it’s a really cool thing to me,” she says. “I love the image of being 80 and still ripping it.”
What used to fuel her stage fright, she says, was her belief that there was a right way and a wrong way to perform. Now, thanks in part to the psychedelics, she understands that “there is no wrong way — the only wrong way would be to be inauthentic.”
Surely, some pop fans are longing to behold perfection.
“Yeah, but they’re not coming to my show,” she says. “I mean, if you are, I’m sorry.”
That attitude extends to how Lorde thinks about her physical appearance. She remembers being “sliced” when she was 16 by a comment someone left on Twitter — “chicken noodle body” — under a paparazzi shot of her on the beach in a bikini.
In the last few years, though, she’s realized that “being very dogmatic with my body is a surefire way to feel really bad,” she says. On tour behind “Solar Power,” “I was very conscious of the size of my body and how the tummy would look onstage. I felt those same questions pop up in advance of this one, and I was like, no, no — to be true to the mission is actually to do none of that.”
There’s a way to frame Lorde’s dressed-down vibe as a rejection of the pop pageantry we associate with Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter or Chappell Roan. Lorde’s not so sure about that.
“I think my thing is pageantry in a different way,” she says. “There’s pageantry in the Times New Roman, you know? The negative space is a statement.”
Even so, after years of feeling like an outlier, Lorde has come to understand her role in music slightly differently. “I’m not a thoroughbred,” she says. “I wasn’t destined to do this for any reason other than I was like, someone’s gotta speak — I’m gonna speak.”
With “Virgin,” she says, “I wanted to make a document of my femininity because I didn’t have it. And I thought once I made it, other people would be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s me too.’”
How would you compare the idea of femininity on “Virgin” to the ideas on your earlier records?This is gonna sound weird, but I honestly feel like “Virgin” is my first album as a woman. I’ve never felt my femininity to be particularly close at hand, and certainly on “Pure Heroine,” I don’t think there’s any gender attached to that narrator. I wasn’t really there yet — [I was] a teenager. A big reason for making “Virgin” was I felt my sense of femininity crash into me one day. I was like, “Holy f—, it’s this? And this? And this?”
You’ve spoken eloquently about the effect of going off birth control. Was that what caused the crashing, or were there other things?It was a real constellation. It was being spoken to in a certain way.
By whom?Cannot [laughs]. I think the experience of briefly having an eating disorder and fighting my way out of it — that felt distinctly female, and cutting the cord on that felt like I became a woman. That sort of coincided with coming off birth control, and all of a sudden …
You know, I actually feel like I haven’t spoken eloquently about getting off birth control. It’s a very hot-button thing. I loved being on birth control, thank God. But I don’t think I’d ever ovulated. And then I was like, OK, I get it — this is for me.
How interested or not are you in becoming a mother?I’ve always felt like I would have children. I’m one of four, and I feel like it’s in the cards for me. But I check the time, and I’m like, God. It creeps up, you know?
Does having children feel like a thing that needs to be part of your life?I think that I should be so lucky to experience a down-to-the-studs transformation as someone whose job it is to get close to the meat of life and talk about what that was like. Obviously, there are countless female artists that I worship who didn’t need to have children to have many massive transformations. But I invite it — and I know it will destroy me and rebuild me.
Lorde’s dancers are starting to trickle into the parking lot, but before she heads into rehearsal I ask her whether she feels driven to explain her work as she’s been doing for the last hour or so.
“I wish it wasn’t this way, but I ache to be understood,” she says. “A big part of why I make work is to feel the peace of being understood. And it’s like a total fool’s errand because being an artist is just being misunderstood over and over. I tried to explain it less this time, but I still feel like I explained it more than I should have.”
You gave an interview around the time of “Virgin’s” release to Zane Lowe —I f— up that interview.
In what way?I was in too girly an outfit, honestly, and I had this hair clip in, and I felt all tight and shy. I couldn’t access it.
Why’d you put the hair clip in?Why the f— did I put the hair clip in? And the girly top! If I’m in a girly top on the wrong day, it’s all over.
How many girly tops did you bring on this trip to L.A.?Very few. I can dress like a woman, but it’s gotta be the right day for it. I don’t know. I’m overthinking it — I’m sure it was fine.
In that interview you seemed to go out of your way to express your thoughts on gender with deference to people whose experience is different than yours.Harder than mine.
Obviously, part of that was a wariness of saying something clumsy that might get clipped on social media. But you seemed genuine in the care you were taking to discuss a complicated topic.Well, as much as I feel its limitation sometimes, language does really matter to me. But I think that’s one that’s really difficult to do justice to with language. I think the video for “Man of the Year” probably did more talking than I did about it.
Is there a question I could have asked today that you would’ve lied in answering?Maybe one.
Are you a more or less trusting person today than you were in 2012?I’m an idealist. I always think if my intentions are pure, nothing’s gonna get hairy.
You been burned by that?Of course. It’s a burnable approach for a pop star in 2025.
You’ve taken four years to make each of your albums since “Pure Heroine.”There’s one thing I feel totally committed to — it’s not allowed to be four years [for the next one]. It has to be sooner.
I’m sure you’ve said that before.I did. But this time I really mean it. I’m over it. It’s time for me to make a different kind of statement that’s less careful or considered.
Maybe that’ll be the legacy of the “Virgin” era.One of my mottoes was “aliveness over prowess.” Just keep it flowing. Let it hang.
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