When Lorde will get ghosted, it’s like Banquo on the feast. “Have you learnt you’re nonetheless with me, once I’m out with my mates?” she sings huskily on the spectral reminiscence of a teenage sweetheart and long-term drug buddy, now off with another person as a substitute. But the New Zealand alt-pop icon’s sudden return with “What Was That” – her first single in 4 years, introduced per week in the past and heralded with an NYPD-bothering mime-along in New York’s Washington Sq. Park for the video – is the fan equal of the phantom of their very own teen obsession booty-calling from nowhere for a bittersweet reminisce.
Her first chapter concerned making herself instantaneous alt-pop royalty with 2013’s Pure Heroine album and exploring the artwork of stoic mainstream melancholy on its follow-up, Melodrama (2017), like a type of Eva Perón of the glittery bikini. Lorde has since haunted pop’s background with the polarised response to 2021’s Photo voltaic Energy, her self-confessed “weed album” that adopted Taylor Swift into the tangled wilds of indie-folk and psychedelia. However final 12 months’s collaboration with Charli XCX on a remix of “Lady, So Complicated”, together with a subsequent visitor look at Coachella, signalled a revived curiosity in EDM and electropop, and “What Was That” definitely appears like her comeback is out to fire up poignant recollections of the nice instances.
“MDMA within the again backyard, blow our pupils up,” she recollects, lacing producer Dev Hynes’ elegant rave beats with the breathy resilience of her trademark introspective dream pop, “We kissed for hours straight … I need you identical to that”. And as she wanders New York a lonely dimension faraway from actuality – masking her mirrors, staring via her mates and carrying “smoke like a marriage veil”, a shadow presence pining for the previous – she appears to embody precisely that rekindled flame.
There’s nothing significantly revolutionary in regards to the monitor itself. If something it’s an inch or two behind the instances, relying closely on the type of snarly slogan hookline that Charli XCX owns now, the more and more drained “shock worth” of mentioning medication or intercourse in pop songs, and a high-reverb vocal twist that can recall, for listeners sufficiently old to recollect Gossip Lady, “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the Individuals, or MGMT. However as a mode of reconnection, it provides Lorde’s topics the whole lot they need – vulnerability, confessional perception and additional means to bounce away the heartache. She rises once more, to push pretenders from their stools.
