Lorde says new album was inspired by her ‘gender broadening’
Lorde also mentioned she found herself "coming into [her] masculinity" whilst she was recording the album
By Gary Grimes
Lorde has given a new interview in which she states her upcoming fourth studio album Virgin was inspired by her “gender broadening”.
In a new interview on Document Journal, the singer, who recently kicked off the album campaign with comeback single ‘What Was That’, spoke about how she wrote the song.
“We just started there because it’s the beginning,” Lorde explained. “It was the first music of my rebirth that had come out of me, and I felt it start the day that we did that.
“Becoming single, but also really facing my body stuff head-on, and starting to feel my gender broadening a little bit. Just being back in my house and feeling this big wave of grief. I just kept thinking, What was all of that?” she recalled. “Whether it was my seven-year relationship or a pandemic or sacrificing my body to my career since I was 16 or 17. This feeling of, Oh, my God, so much has moved through me.
“There’s so much mystery and pain,” she went on. “I just held the mic and sort of walked around the room and said it all. I didn’t write anything down, which was cool.”
Lorde went on to mention how she relationship with her own “masculinity” changed as she made the LP.
“We were working in the East Village, and we walked past this flyer. I think it was for joining a band or something, and it said, ‘Do you have the stones?’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s tight,’” the singer recalled. “I didn’t understand what it was saying at first. I know now it’s like, do you think you have the balls? But it gave me this feeling that there was a mysticism to it. ‘The stones’ felt like, do you have the sort of touchstones or the talismans to go there?
“I was also coming into my masculinity a bit more as well”
“Seeing that as I was also coming into my masculinity a bit more as well. That became the thing we would say to each other while making music,” she went on. “When there was a crossroads where we’d want to take it there but we were scared, we’d be like, ‘Do we have the stones?’”
Virgin, the new album by Lorde, is out on 27 June.