In a little less than a month, Lorde will release her hugely anticipated new album Virgin, and she shared the lead single "What Was That" last month. Today, Lorde's got another new song, and it has to do with gender identity, something that she's been discussing a lot lately. In a recent Rolling Stone profile, Lorde talks about a recent conversation with Chappell Roan: "She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up." Her new song is called "Man Of The Year," and its cover art is a picture of Lorde's torso, with her chest taped up.
Lorde co-wrote and co-produced "Man Of The Year" with Jim-E Stack, and Dev Hynes plays cello on the song. It starts out as a wispy, minimal pop track, but it builds to a big, distorted power-drone finale. On the chorus, Lorde sings, "I didn't think he'd appear/ Let's hear it for the man of the year." (The song's press release uses she/her pronouns, so that's what I'm doing here.) In the song's video, Lorde tapes up her chest and throws herself to the floor in an otherwise-empty apartment where the floor is half-covered in dirt. It comes from director Grant Singer, who previously did Lorde's "Green Light" and "Perfect Places" videos.
Her her website, Lorde posted the "Man Of The Year" video with this text:
BIKING. SMOKING. SWIMMING. NEW STRENGTH IN MY SHOULDERS. FEELING SOMETHING AWAKENING. FIRST TAPING MY CHEST. SO SCARED TO BE HIM. THE GQ PARTY. LAYING BACK ON THE WHITE COUCH W THE MIC IN MY HAND AND LETTING IT HAPPEN. SUN. PERSIMMONS AND WALNUTS. VOCALS WITH AMS. TRYING TO MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A FONTANA, LIKE PAINTING BITTEN BY A MAN, LIKE THE NEW YORK EARTH ROOM. THE SOUND OF MY REBIRTH.
In a recent Rolling Stone video interview, Lorde talked about that tape, saying that it became "a portal to my masculinity." She says that she wrote "Man Of The Year" while picturing the person that she wanted to be while singing the song onstage, and she wanted to be shirtless in her chain, but with something "to sort of hint at binding... I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was like, 'That's me. That's who I am.' I really just saw my body as an extension of the work of art."
Lorde also won Song Of The Year at last night's Aotearoa Music Awards, an annual show in her native New Zealand. She also talked about the song in a Triple J interview yesterday.
Over the weekend, Lorde appeared at a Lorde-themed party at the Sydney nightclub Mary's Underground.
On Wednesday, Lorde hosted a Virgin listening party in Auckland, where she reportedly revealed the LP's tracklist. Check out that tracklist below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Hammer"
02 "What Was That"
03 "Shapeshifter"
04 "Man Of The Year"
05 "Favourite Daughter"
06 "Current Affairs"
07 "Clearblue"
08 "GRWM"
09 "Broken Glass"
10 "If She Could See Me Now"
11 "David"
Virgin is out 6/27 on Universal.
