Good Lorde! Behind the Blissed-Out Comeback of a Pop Iconoclast

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Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, who makes music under the name Lorde, somehow finds a way to push through the gate and descend the steps to my front door with a fig tart in the crook of her elbow and a half-cooked frittata balanced on her forearms. With the surety of an old friend—though we have never met before—she heads straight for the kitchen, lays down the tart, and pops the trembling dish of eggs in the oven. This week marks the beginning of what she calls the “gnarly season,” when the play of making an album gives way to the work of promoting it, and Yelich-O’Connor has arrived in Los Angeles—the city that anointed her on Grammy night in 2014 and that has more or less mystified her ever since—before the frenzy begins, in order to get her COVID vaccine. (Pfizer, for the curious.) A beneficent friend offered her a house in the Palisades, but it’s always hard to cook in an unfamiliar oven. I tell her I won’t judge. She tells me she would.

“I think you should never apologize for what you cook,” Yelich-O’Connor says. Her hair, parted down the middle, resolves in two taut braids, and under deeply arching, dense brows, her glacier blue eyes are warm but active, probing. Like any self-respecting frittata, this one has cleared the crisper drawer of its dubious leeks, peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, kale, and tomatoes. The figgy pudding is no less ad hoc. “I kind of freaked it, to be honest. I read a couple recipes and went rogue with what was in the house. This lunch is the product of its wild upbringing.”

Those words provide an apt description of Lorde’s third album, Solar Power, which emerged out of a period of feral exploration in her home country of New Zealand, of time spent in the grass and the wind and the water, gazing up at the sun rather than down at the phone. It is a celebration of the natural world, a meditation on the hazards of a plugged-in existence, and, like her previous work, an update on Lorde’s life since our last glimpse of it. In conversation, Yelich-O’Connor not infrequently refers to herself as a pop star, as if by doing so she might be able to work through the temperamental mismatch of her fame. Ever since the song “Royals,” a precocious critique of contemporary star culture, brought her at the tender age of 16 the very thing it cautioned against, Yelich-O’Connor has politely insisted on a furtive, sparingly dosed celebrity.

“I’m great at my job, but I’m not sure I’m the man for the job,” she explains. “I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m not built for pop star life. To have a public-facing existence is something I find really intense and is something I’m not good at. That natural charisma is not what I have. I have the brain in the jar.” As the frittata sets up, Yelich-O’Connor hacks at a tall pile of herbs with which to adorn it, in the manner of Yotam Ottolenghi, a kitchen hero of hers. “But for whatever reason people have allowed me to say, Okay, I’m going to come and do the thing—do the shoot, do the red carpet, speak to the journalists, put the music out—and when I’ve done it to the point of total exhaustion, when I have completely quenched that thirst, I’m going to go home, and you’re not going to see me for two or three or four years. I’ll be doing the other thing, which is being there for every single birthday and dinner party and cooking every single meal and going on every single walk and taking every single bath. And when I’ve done that, and I’m like, all right, that’s enough of that for a little while, I’ll come back again.”

Pure Heroine, Lorde’s first studio album, chronicled suburban disaffection and teen angst; it was the portrait of a girl standing at the edge of a party or walking home through an empty, moonlit golf course, imagining a world bigger than her own. Told in lush harmonies and austere electronica, the album’s avant-garde populism found a global audience of adolescents and other yearners. Melodrama, her second effort, reflected on a painful breakup, on enmeshment and aloneness, in a suite of songs that seem to catalog each labile mood of a teenager on a single, endless night out. In contrast, Solar Power sets childish things aside. It is Lorde’s answer to the question of how, exactly, to enter adulthood amid a crumbling natural world, a ceaselessly surveilling digital landscape, and a consumer culture that would commodify our every breath if it could. Solar Power’s soft acoustic guitars testify to a few years listening to Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the Mamas & the Papas, and indeed the spirit of the counterculture underpins the set like the insistent shake of a tambourine. Yelich-O’Connor, who turns 25 in November, says that her albums can be distinguished by the drugs she was using when making them: Pure Heroine is alcohol, Melodrama is MDMA, and Solar Power is cannabis—not bong hits in the bedroom so much as gummies on a bluff at sunset.

In 2018, Yelich-O’Connor came home to New Zealand after touring for Melodrama. She was fried. That second album had felt awfully high stakes, as second albums often do. It had been a collaboration with the songwriter and producer Jack Antonoff, whom she met in early 2014 when he brought her a can of pineapple juice at a Grammy party. Yelich-O’Connor was never in the same place for long in the breathless early days of her success, jumping from Auckland to L.A. to Brooklyn (where Antonoff has a recording space in the apartment he kept with his then girlfriend, Lena Dunham). If there was a period in which she lived the fantasy cynically laid out in “Royals,” this was it. “California,” she says, “was a Cadillac Escalade. All these beautiful young people drinking all this tequila. Then I’d come home to Auckland for two weeks and have a massive blowout party at my house, and have some romantic entanglement happening that was very compelling and confusing, and then sort of leave in a cloud of smoke and go and write about that, then repeat the process.”

Melodrama was a critical darling and earned her an album of the year nomination at the Grammy Awards in 2018. (The prize went to Bruno Mars’s 24K Magic.) In its aftermath, Yelich-O’Connor settled into the house she had bought at 18, a villa in an enclave just outside Auckland. She adopted a dog, a retriever mix she called Pearl. She tended her garden, deepened old connections. A group of friends would rent a big house on a cliff, and they would spend a whole summer there walking down to the water, swimming, fishing, and cooking sprawling dinners. It was a heady period, and New Zealand itself began to nourish her in unfamiliar ways.

“I totally agree and disagree with Ella that she’s not suited for celebrity,” says the photographer Ophelia Mikkelson Jones, a close friend who shot the cover art for Solar Power during a road trip along the New Zealand coast at the end of last year. “She’s a shy and reserved woman, but she has this incredible intelligence. She’s so alert, always awake and watching, and she has the most insane memory. I’m stoked by the idea that someone in her position would have these qualities, and they also make her a great friend.”

“We’re probably less than two years apart, but she’s my mom,” says another friend, the singer-songwriter Clairo. “Even from a distance, you feel her presence, like she’s watching over you. I think she’s had this effect on so many young people. I think she’s made a lot of people feel understood and comfortable in whatever state they’re in.”

At home in Auckland these last years, Yelich-O’Connor recalls feeling young in a way that somehow eluded her when she was a teenager. “I was so serious and shy and tough. And I think that coming home, having a second record under the belt, I just felt like I could relax and play,” she explains. “I don’t know—something started to happen, and it was all to do with spend­ing time outside.”

Up to now, Yelich-O’Connor had never really connected to the outdoors; she may have clocked the beauty of a pristine forest or the imperiousness of a range of tall mountains, but soon enough she’d be back inside, phone in her hand. In 2018 she got off social media altogether. “I could sense that it would be very bad for the work and for me if I stayed online,” she explains. “I don’t think I’ve met too many people for whom social media is a net positive. It’s producing crazy chemicals, forming crazy neural pathways that are not rooted in positivity. You don’t want to be the person shaking their finger, and I’m totally aware that it’s an immense privilege, a social privilege and kind of an economic privilege to be able to abstain. But I think we’ve got to be upfront about the things that are making us sick as a society.”

Yelich-O’Connor does not think much of her own willpower, and she recruited a coder friend to block sites in the source code of her devices. “So I’m not, like, lurking on a Finsta. I’m really off,” she says. In due course she became a person who doesn’t understand the prevailing meme, the joke of the day, the newest catchword. “I think I was known for having my finger on the pulse, so it was actually a huge decision philosophically for me to step back from that. But I started to see the phone as a portal. I can’t keep going through that portal, in the same way that I wouldn’t just take mushrooms all these moments of a day. It’s too deep a tunnel.”

Solar Power is another collaboration with Antonoff, who has written songs or produced for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and St. Vincent, among others. Yelich-O’Connor expects that the two will always make music together. “Jack listens really well,” she says. “He’s in therapy. He’s good to talk to about the kinds of things that people writing deep shit into a song want to talk about. I think there’s an understanding with us that we’re going to do this for a really long time, and it’s going to be one of the great relationships of both of our lives.” If Solar Power had a master text, it was the Oakland-based artist and writer Jenny Odell’s 2019 book How to Do Nothing, which argues for the value of retraining one’s attention to the natural world while reconsidering what it means to be productive. Yelich-O’Connor devoured her ideas. She read broadly about the dropping-out movement of the late 1960s and was struck by the similarities between that era’s utopian idealism, disillusionment with government, and engagement in civil rights and environmental issues and the passions that innervate her own generation. Those who have seen the video for Solar Power’s titular first single, in which Lorde plays queen to a band of midsummer merrymakers, dancing on the sand, smoking from a pipe fashioned out of a fennel bulb, may discern some of the flower-­power vibes of the “I’d Like to Give the World a Coke” commercial from 1971. Yelich-O’Connor is aware that her character in the video has been compared to a hippie cult leader. “I’m getting Wild Wild Country,” she says, laughing. “A little? I’m calling it a community more than a cult.”

A few weeks later, Yelich-O’Connor and I are both in New York, and she asks me to meet her at Kalustyan’s, the bounteous Murray Hill spice shop beloved of both ambitious Manhattan home cooks and restaurant mixologists in search of the most rarefied cocktail garnishes. Despite her self-imposed media embargo, Yelich-O’Connor allows herself two iPhone news apps, The New York Times and The New Yorker, and she read about Kalustyan’s in a recent paean in the Times’ food section. We do a slow, dumbstruck inventory, past cardamom-scented sugarplums, orange-blossom ice cream, salt smoked over Chardonnay oak, puffed water-lily seeds, and bags of bright purple dried forget-me-nots. Yelich-O’Connor counsels a fellow patron on the pleasures and challenges of black tahini: “It will make some things ugly and others beautiful.” She buys herself a tin of smoked mussels, a bag of shucked Sicilian pistachios, and a handful of Uzbekistani apricots, dried on their pits.

Food played a crucial role in the family rituals of Yelich-O’Connor’s childhood in Auckland, in a comfortable middle-class suburb on the city’s North Shore. She is the second of four children of Sonja Yelich, a poet and the daughter of Croatian immigrants, and Vic O’Connor, a civil engineer. It was a home with books and open newspapers on every surface, and spirited discussions enlivened the family’s nightly sit-down dinners. Yelich-O’Connor recalls a mix of structure and freedom. She could often be found sitting high up in a magnolia tree in the backyard, arranging for books or snacks to be ferried up in a basket tied to a rope. “I was very aware as a kid that my mom’s position was—no, you guys play, I have my own things that I do,” Yelich-O’Connor remembers. “She wasn’t trying to get down there and play Sylvanian Families with us, and I realize now what a nice approach that was, to give us that freedom.”

Her parents held her to high intellectual, if not academic, standards. Yelich-O’Connor once estimated that she had read more than 1,000 books by age 12. When she was 14, she edited her mother’s 40,000-word master’s thesis. “Words were really prized,” she explains. “I don’t think I realized then that it wasn’t the same in other families. But for some people, it’s like a religion.” Yelich-O’Connor has never felt herself to be a natural performer, and she was not a ham as a kid, but she liked the way that drama class and public speaking animated her language. She started performing in school musicals and singing with a classmate. When she was 12, the father of a boy who accompanied her on guitar sent a recorded performance to an A&R executive, who passed over the guitarist but signed Yelich-O’Connor on the spot.

It became clear almost immediately to the management at Universal Music New Zealand that Lorde, as she decided to call herself, would be writing her own lyrics. At around this time, she fell under the spell of short stories, and Raymond Carver, especially, helped to shape her style as a songwriter. “Carver was huge for me because the parlance was so domestic, and the words were really basic, and there was such economy,” she explains. “I understood that someone was speaking to me the way people speak to one another. I didn’t feel intimidated by it, and that was probably the beginning of my understanding of myself as a popular-culture maker.” As a listener of music, she was likewise struck by artists who had found ways to make pop hits out of complex and ambitious music. Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds and Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange dominated her imagination. “I think it’s a better test of people’s skill for something to be really clever and really simple. That impresses me because I know it’s harder. I had friends who were like, ‘Oh, you mean you don’t understand the polyphonic intricacies of The Mars Volta?’ There was a lot of highbrow musicality around me in my friend group, and I was like, I don’t know anything, I can’t play anything. I’m smart, but that’s not doing anything for me.”

Straightaway Lorde’s music declared her an outsider, an ugly duckling. Pure Heroine takes numerous shots at the cool girls. “All my fake friends…” she sings on “A World Alone,” “they’re studying business, I study the floor.” Her frank and searching exploration of the trials of adolescence has built her an intensely loyal fandom. But far from clamoring for daily drips of manufactured content, Lorde’s acolytes tend to express protective impulses online. They know that privacy is important to her and that this makes the rare glimpses of her life more special. They patiently await the newsletters—Lorde’s preferred means of communication with her fans—that slip into their in-boxes: diaristic, stream-of-consciousness musings wrapped in long hugs. Yelich-O’Connor is widely believed to be in a long-standing relationship with a music executive named Justin Warren, though she has never spoken of it publicly. “I love when all famous people can say is, ‘I’m very happy.’ ” she tells me. “You can write that she’s very happy. Healthy boundaries.”

Yelich-O’Connor understands that she does not have a lot of casual listeners, that the public has tended to respond to her with strong feelings or no feelings. She is pleased to know that she connects with LGBTQ+ audiences. “I have a big young, queer contingent to my fan base, which is so divine to me,” she says. “You think you know what your kids will be like—you think they’ll just be like you, like, a million little yous. In the same way that if you wrote a book, maybe you’d imagine it would only be interesting to people like you. But it’s different.” She digs into her bag for a pair of apricots, dark and richly perfumed, one for each of us. “I have much cynicism,” she goes on, “but not about what I know to be the alchemical thing that happens in my work. The work is very powerful to people. My fans are young, and I just know that they look to me for a lot emotionally and spiritually. But it’s an attachment like any other. You want it to be a healthy one. It needs to be right for both of us, and there needs to be that understanding that mummy does go away to the other room, and she will come back!”

We jump into a southbound taxi and make our way to her hotel, the kind of place where paparazzi keep vigil outside, and where, she says, some in the fame game take up residence for no reason other than to engage these paparazzi. Not Yelich-O’Connor, who has the key to a secret entrance and weaves us through the giant laundry bins that line long subterranean corridors before we emerge into a tranquil garden. She orders a bitters and soda, because though it is teatime, she cannot tolerate caffeine. Yelich-O’Connor wears an old Dries Van Noten slip dress, in black with black flowers. Her sandals and bag come from The Row. She is into fashion, even if “The Path,” Solar Power’s opening track, contains an ambivalent allusion to the Met gala. “I can register fashion as both beautiful and absurd,” she says to me. “I do remember that visceral moment”—at the gala in 2015—“of thinking, A pharaoh is lying right there, and we’re in couture. But I kind of love it. There’s tons to be gotten from all of it.”

Solar Power finds Lorde basking in a corporeality that the artist once banished. The much-chattered-about album cover captures her from directly below, mid-leap, an unapologetic crotch shot. The woman who once sang “pretty girls don’t know the things that I know” is now calling herself “a prettier Jesus” in the title track. The brain may be in the jar, but the bod is on the lam. “When I said I felt young for the first time—it meant feeling like I’m confident enough to put my butt out there. I wouldn’t have been able to do that as a teenager,” she explains. “When you’re really famous as a young person, feelings get magnified. At that time, people were discussing my body on Twitter, and the natural response was to shrink away from it. Now I have a sense of my worth and my power, and my body is—awesome, for one thing. But it’s also not as central as my brain is to the whole operation. I don’t think you could make me feel bad about myself now by saying something about my body, but that’s the difference between 16 and 24. When I talk about being playful in the making of this album, there was, for want of a better word, a sexual component to that. Engaging the natural world in a big way is like a flirtation. That’s how it felt to me. Playful and joyful and a little bit nasty.”

By the time we get up, dusk has started to paint the sky over the Hudson River—a toxic oil slick of a sunset that Yelich-O’Connor has learned to love as much as the pristine skies of her mythical home country—and she is making moves to return to her room to watch what would be the deciding game of the NBA finals. (As for how and why she became a fan of American professional basketball, the answer may reside behind the “healthy boundaries” firewall.) It will be another early night in the gnarly season, as she is expected in the studio at 8:30 a.m. to sing the album’s second single, “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” for a taped performance on one of the late-night shows.

For all its feel-good summer vibes, Solar Power can’t help but be a Lorde album, plaintive, nostalgic, tinted with loss and the uneasiness of change. In that second single, Lorde laments, “All the music you loved at 16 you’ll grow out of.” But maybe that isn’t a lament after all. “This music came from a very joyful period of life for me,” Yelich-O’Connor says. “I’m very comfortable in a place of vulnerability or contemplation of the future or my own mortality. Those are not necessarily scary or sad spaces for me to occupy, and the fact that they’re on there means that I kind of moved through it and have felt the joy coming out the other side. I only come back because I’ve had one of these epiphanic periods. I’ve shifted shape, and I want to do that justice. And then I know when it’s time to go back and spend another year reading on my couch.”

In this story: hair, Jimmy Paul; makeup, Fara Homidi. Special thanks to The Castle Inn of the LostCoast.

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