One of the best things Ive ever done: Lorde on the joys of a social-media blackout

He laughs. “I did say, ‘Can we have a point in time where we start, you know, selling?’ And three or four months later, when it had been downloaded 60,000 times globally, and gone the equivalent of four times platinum in New Zealand, we flicked the switch to commercial and” – he makes a gesture with his arm, like a jet plane taking off – “it just took fire.”

Royals has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide; the album it heralded, Pure Heroine, has sold more than five million. Lorde was hailed by critics as a defining pop artist of the decade; The New York Times called her a “wunderkind pop auteur”; David Bowie anointed her “the future of music”. Not bad for a girl still living in her parents’ house with three siblings, many books, and a lot of bad-hair days. But that, after all, was the point.

In true fairy tale fashion, Lorde’s best friend is a young woman called Ophelia Mikkelson Jones, who looks exactly like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine (as does Lorde, in her own way). The pair met in their late teens: Lorde was 16 and had just released Royals, Ophelia was at university and making socks in her spare time. (Somehow this seems an intensely New Zealand thing to do: one imagines the wholesome wool, the hand spinning, the soothing click of needles.) Lorde cycled around to Jones’s house in the pouring rain to buy some, and the friendship was born.

The thing about Lorde, says Jones (who is a photographer, and took the startling cover shot of Solar Power, lying on the beach with Lorde jumping over her), is that “I can always tell that she’s observing the world very intensely and beautifully. So when I hear these songs about a summer, or a party, or whatever, it’s like, ‘Oh, I remember that. And you were with us, and you were experiencing the same thing as us, but you were doing something else as well.’”

Here it is again: Lorde’s ability to observe, collate and universalise the particularities of her own life. Her second album, Melodrama, released in 2017, was largely written in the aftermath of her break-up with her first serious boyfriend, photographer James Lowe. This was her only public relationship; since then she’s been linked to everyone from Jack Antonoff, her collaborator since 2016, to music executive Justin Warren. Antonoff and Warren have denied these rumours; Lorde preserves a diplomatic silence (though she did once call Antonoff my “songwriting husband”, and explain that the relationship was purely platonic).

Maybe she thinks she’s said everything there is to say about love. She’s certainly pounded away at heartbreak: song after song on Melodrama interrogates the feelings of rage, loss, helplessness, defiance and freedom that the end of a relationship brings. Of course, all of this was exactly what her fans were feeling, too. Even though she was already well and truly a celebrity, she was also still like everyone else. Having your heart broken, feeling alienated from your friends, dancing badly at parties: if these aren’t the universal struggles of your early 20s, what are? Lorde and her fans were still experiencing life together, and Melodrama – which was critically and commercially acclaimed, though it never reached the peak of Pure Heroine – still spoke to them.

Last year, Lorde went to Antarctica. She’s self-aware enough to make jokes about this (How many pop stars have been to Antarctica? One. How many pop stars are useful in Antarctica? Zero), but it’s also clear she was desperate to go, and prepared to parlay her fame into a trip. (She went as an ambassador with Antarctica New Zealand, a NZ government body; she performed no scientific work, but garnered enormous publicity for the organisation, and the continent.)

“I’ve been completely fascinated by Antarctica since I was a kid,” she says. “We learn about it in school in New Zealand, I’d read tons of biographies about it; it was such a bucket list thing for me. And I had started to engage a lot more with our climate crisis. It felt very abstract to me, and I wanted it to feel more real.”

Did it?

“Well, it did and it didn’t. It’s funny. You go there, and it’s so cold, it’s hard for your brain to compute that the world is actually hotter than it’s ever been, because it’s the coldest you’ve ever been. But just the sort of raw power and intensity of it all kind of put me in my place in a funny way. It’s beautiful, but terrifying as well. It was a very singular experience.”

The trip, about which Lorde produced a quirky book, Going South, which sold out the moment it was published, was actually part of a trajectory that began with her decision to go offline. It’s a course that has been plotted by the new great love of her life: not a man, or a new art form, but what she calls, slightly self-consciously, “the natural world”.

It began when she got home after her Melodrama tour, went offline and got a dog. Pearl was a sweet-faced canine of indeterminate breed whom Lorde adored, describing him as “the shepherd ahead of me”.

“I knew he would be the thing that would take me into the next phase of my life,” she says. “Just going for walks with him. He was really my entry point into being so much more attuned to the natural world. I’ve never been into any kind of religion,” she goes on, “but I realised, ‘Wow. If I go outside, no matter how I’m feeling, it will all be better and clearer and…’ ”

She breaks off. “This is such a hectic chat, isn’t it?” she says, laughing. “You’re going to be like, ‘Oh god: pop star, in California, talking about spirituality, ugh…’ I’m so sorry! But anyway.” She regathers herself. “Just being outside felt like such a spiritual thing to me. And also, on a simpler level, being at home again I realised that I was having these big dinner parties out in the garden in the summer, you know, and I was really strong and tanned: I could drive a boat and fillet a fish and cook for 20 people! And all the plants in my garden were kind of swaying in the golden light, and it was just magical and fun and…drinking nice tequila…it was all just awesome, and it was all outside!”

It was being in nature, she says, that allowed her to finally process the emotions and demands of Melodrama. “I did have a hard time [with that album], for a lot of reasons,” she agrees. “The work was very heavy; I found it very heavy to be reliving that intense period of my life over and over. And I was at a very tender age, and just like, yeah, very anxious…it was a lot. I felt more adolescent then, weirdly, than I did making Pure Heroine.”

She stops and thinks. “But then, I mean, you just grow up, you know? I feel so much more steady in who I am now, I don’t feel like I need to compete with my peers. I think [with Melodrama] I still sort of felt like, ‘Oh, the music has to get to this number on this chart, and it’s got to sell this many of this,’ and now I’m like, ‘It’s all good. I know that it’ll all be fine, and people will love it.’”

Thus was her third album, Solar Power, born: out of pleasure and joy and “that feeling you get lying on the beach with the sun on your face, maybe there’s a drink in your hand, maybe there’s a cute guy over there… just putting that whole thing together. It’s a sun-worship album.”

As with all her music, she planned it meticulously. “I’ve realised as I’ve got older – it’s quite embarrassing – but I do make concept albums, pretty much! I think through the whole thing, and I only write the songs that fit the album – I never finish anything else.” This time round, she got herself a whiteboard, and wrote ‘Solar Power’ across the top in marker pen. “I had these little columns for everything, and everything colour-coded, and I also had a big running note on my cell phone, and a notebook.”

“I had been imbued – he had imbued me – with this joy and pleasure in nature, and I just sort of wanted to see it through, and have the experience of making the music be healing. I wanted that refuge.”

Lorde has sound-to-colour synaesthesia, where sounds are linked to colours in her mind, and this album is “gold, I guess. But also water-coloured, and grass: this sort of acid green, aquamarine palette of the water and the grass and the sky. But lots of golds and yellows and oranges and browns. It’s all kind of earthy. And my dog was gold. Gold. He sort of glowed, and I think of his colour as the colour of the album, too.”

Horribly, Pearl died during the making of Solar Power – of an unexpected heart attack, in Lorde’s arms. “It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” she says. His death delayed the album, but didn’t derail it. “I was quite a way into making something, and the huge amounts of joy and celebration and spiciness and fun that I had felt, those had been committed, if you like, and I didn’t feel like they were all f…ed or anything.

“Well,” she considers. “I did feel like it was all f…ed for a bit. But I kind of righted course. It took a long time in my personal life, but professionally I felt like I had been imbued – he had imbued me – with this joy and pleasure in nature, and I just sort of wanted to see it through, and have the experience of making the music be healing. I wanted that refuge.”

It is not, she points out, a climate change album. “It’s good to make that distinction,” she says, “and it’s a distinction I’ve had to make, because I’m a pop star, not a climate scientist! I drive a huge machine that spits out a ton of emissions and uses a ton of resources and for me to be like, ‘Here’s my climate change record,’ would be really misguided and probably harmful.

“I read this really cool thing the other day about the actor Mark Rylance, who’s this sort of climate-minded person. And he said something about, ‘We’ve tried to scare people or make them feel guilty, and that doesn’t work. What we need is to be telling love stories about our planet.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that totally resonates with me.’ And I think that’s what I’ve done.”

When Lorde released her Solar Power single in June, there was some unexpected publicity: lots of people were amazed, and initially discomfited, that it sounded so much like George Michael’s Freedom, and so much like Primal Scream’s Loaded (even I, pop ignoramus, can hear the similarities). But the people closest to the music were unfazed. Lorde contacted Primal Scream front man Bobby Gillespie, who gave Solar Power his blessing. “He was so lovely about it,” she said at the time. “He was like, ‘You know, these things happen. You caught a vibe that we caught years ago.’” And George Michael’s estate said he would have been “flattered” by the comparison.

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Questions of attribution aside, Lorde’s Solar Power is exactly what she wanted it to be: a groovy, laid back, Laurel Canyonesque paeon of praise to summer. It’s also light years away from Royals. The video clip is filmed on a beach – reportedly on Waiheke Island, close to Auckland – but it’s a fantasy beach (a Taylor Swift beach, not a Lorde beach), all perfect white sand and driftwood tepees and swags of pastel muslin swaying in the breeze. Lorde is there, supposedly just, you know, hanging out with her mates. But her mates are all suspiciously beautiful and break into dance routines like a musical cast, and Lorde is wearing a sunshine yellow bikini top and slinky midi skirt by sustainable New York label Collina Strada, for which you wouldn’t get much change out of $NZ1000, and which is hard to imagine anyone actually wearing on an actual beach. Lorde in Collina Strada is not Beyoncé in $10,000-plus Fendi fur, but she’s no everywoman, either.

“It’s a distinction I’ve had to make, because I’m a pop star, not a climate scientist! I drive a huge machine that spits out a ton of emissions and uses a ton of resources.”

Everything in Solar Power is beautifully colour co-ordinated, beautifully polished and beautifully not ordinary – most of all Lorde herself. She seems slimmer and more toned than in the past (as my friend and Lorde fan said sadly, “She has abs now”); the mop of hair is gone, replaced by plush dark locks; the make-up is perfect, the skipping across the sand while looking coyly back to camera is artfully graceful. She can even dance. That’s right, you heard it here first. Lorde is now a cool dancer.

If all this sounds like nitpicking, it is. It’s a smooth, sexy song, and people love it. But it also shows that Lorde – who, at the ripe old age of 24, has been a pop star for almost a decade – is confronting a new challenge. What do you do when your art relies on your ability to universalise shared experience, but your life no longer contains very much shared experience at all?

The truth is, as the years have passed, Lorde’s life has become less and less like those of other people. She’s an internationally recognisable celebrity and multimillionaire. How many 20-somethings can say this? Even on a smaller, more day-to-day scale, how many of the people who love her music have been to Antarctica? How many have deleted all their social media accounts to live a more mindful, outdoors life? How many travel to LA where, as well as treading red carpets, performing on late-night TV and being on the cover of US Rolling Stone, on this trip they’ve been able to be vaccinated against COVID-19, far in advance of the rest of their age cohort? I can tell you how many. Zero.

Still. The lovely thing about Lorde is that she knows all this. She can see the distance between her and her fans: she’s too clever not to. And she thinks she can bridge the gap. In a recent newsletter, she explains that she has two lives: the life of a normal young woman who cooks and gardens and walks the dog, and the life of a pop titan who can “tear apart a festival stage or be in seven countries in seven days”.

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“I know now that as hard as I try to run towards or away from one of the sides of my life, they’re both very much who I am,” she writes. “It’s jarring to move between them, but that dichotomy is me.”

Time will tell whether fans accept this – accept her. “I am a weird ask,” she says cheerfully, leaning forward, “because I was really big straight away, but really I am a bit more of an acquired taste. I just want to talk about sun worship and transcendentalism and f…ing all the bullshit I want to talk about – and I think it took people a minute to figure out where to put me.” She grins.

Maybe this is true. And maybe the reality is that as we get older, we all have less in common with each other. The seismic generalities of adolescence – sexual awakening, emotional turmoil, finding our place in the world – become the unique particularities of adulthood. Lorde’s life, of course, is particularly unique. But maybe we shouldn’t hold that against her.

At the end of our conversation, I bring up something that has nothing to do with fame or pop music or saving the world, but that I’ve read Lorde feels passionately about. Perfume. “Perfume?!” cries Lorde, sounding surprised. “Yes! I love!” She sits up straight. “I have such a strong nose, Amanda, that I can identify almost anyone’s perfume. I’m really, really good. I identified one yesterday that … do you know Le Labo fragrances?”

Not at all, I admit.

“It’s this fancy New York brand,” explains Lorde, “and there’s a well-known fragrance from them called Santal. But there’s a kind of jump-off fragrance from another brand that I know smells like that, and that’s the one I identified: the imitation of the original!”

She looks as pleased by this as she has about anything we’ve discussed. “If I made a perfume,” she volunteers, “I always said it would be the fragrance of crushed tomato leaf. You know that smell? Amazing. But I actually recently found a tomato leaves candle by Loewe, so someone’s beat me to that idea.”

Is it any good? She considers. “I’d have a few tweaks, but it’s right in the wheelhouse.”

“Everything’s got a smell to me,” she confesses.

“I wear one scent each [album] cycle. At the moment it’s Mojave Ghost: that sort of desert flower-type smell, quite Californian. I’m sure I’ll spritz that on every night on tour and really go there.” (She’s touring Australia from next March.)

Maybe you could get into producing your own perfume, I suggest.

“Ooooh,” says Lorde. “That’s very pop star.”

Not very sustainable, though.

“I’ll just tell people to crush a tomato leaf.” She stops and squints at me. “Oh, look,” she exclaims, sounding pleased: “Look behind you. The sun’s coming up!”

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