singer
From grunge teen to sun worshiper: Lorde turns 25
Lorde at the benefit gala of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021. Photo: Evan Agostini / Invision via AP / dpa
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Lorde just turned 17 when she received two Grammys. With her first single “Royals” she is already there where others want to end up as the high point of their careers. How do you go from there?
“I hate the winter”, sings Lorde in “Solar Power”. It’s good that the artist doesn’t live in Germany. Because here on her birthday, November 7th, it is pretty dark and cold. In their native New Zealand, on the other hand, summer slowly begins around this time.
And that’s exactly what “Solar Power” is about. In the background you can hear cicadas chirping and the sound of the sea. In the music video, the singer, who turns 25 this Sunday, is jumping around on the beach in a lemon-yellow two-piece. The single and the corresponding album of the same name, which was released this year, completely break with their previous work.
Teenage boy with a grunge look
When Lorde became world famous in 2013 with “Royals” and the accompanying debut album “Pure Heroine”, she appeared as a thoughtful teenager with a modern grunge aesthetic. The kind of girls who tend to stay in the background at school, always wear black and in the German LK impress the whole class with their clever thoughts.
The singer, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O’Connor, is the daughter of a poet and is very well-read herself. In songwriting, for example, she takes inspiration from Shakespeare or socially critical essays. Adults are surprised by Lorde’s maturity, which David Bowie called the “future of music”.
The young woman is showered with awards, including two Grammys. Then it becomes quiet about Lorde for the time being. Her second album “Melodrama” will only be released in 2017, followed by “Solar Power” in 2021. She uses the long time between her albums to experience things that she can then write about, she explains in an interview with Vogue.
«Onion Rings» on Instagram
She also likes to cook in her free time and has even more or less secretly started her own Instagram account via “Onion Rings”. After a three-year hiatus, Lorde is now supplying the meanwhile 124,000 subscribers with onion ring reviews.
She also said in an interview with James Corden that the comment columns in the New York Times’ Kochapp are the only form of network that she allowed herself during a long break from social networks. The social media abstinence is the “hardest thing she has ever done”.
However, she wants to concentrate on her work and develop her own perspectives on things instead of being influenced by other opinions of others. For example, two months ago she released an EP on which she sang five songs from “Solar Power” again in Māori. And it will be interesting to see what Lorde will come up with for the future.