The singer-songwriter’s fourth album, Virgin, drops next month
Lorde continues teasing her fourth album, Virgin, with second single “Man of the Year.” The track follows her April release “What Was That.”
Like the entirety of Virgin, Lorde worked on the song with producer Jim-E Stack. The track also features Dev Hynes on cello. On the mid-tempo single, Lorde reflects on her “recent ego-death,” singing about how we’re meeting her at a very strange time in her life. The accompanying music video features the singer-songwriter alone in a room in a white tee and jeans. As the song progresses, she peels off her shirt and duct-tapes her breasts before she sings, “Now I’m broken open/Let’s hear it for the man of the year.”
In her Rolling Stone cover story, Lorde revealed that the song was an integral part of her understanding the fluidity of her own gender identity. She recalled sitting on the floor of her apartment, trying to visualize a version of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment.” She landed on an image of herself wearing men’s jeans, duct tape on her chest, and a gold chain.
“I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself,” she said. “I have this picture staring at myself. I was blond [at the time]. It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.”
The song was also written shortly after Lorde chose to stop taking birth control for the first time since she was a teenager. It led to her ovulating for the first time in years, an experience she likened to the “best drug” she’s ever done.
“I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she said. “It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.” Lorde described herself as “in the middle gender-wise.” She still uses she/her pronouns and identifies as a cis woman.
Virgin is set to release on June 27, four years after her last album, Solar Power.
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