We’re guessing that Lorde must be pretty pleased about the warm reception that’s been given to her comeback single, What Was That. Not least because, as she recently confirmed, she was working on it for almost a year.
Asked by Radio 1’s Jack Saunders what she was looking for before she was ready to call a halt to the production, Lorde - real name Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor - said: “Just the right amount of dirt, but also elegance… It was really just me, like, listening to myself and being, like, ‘OK, now we can stop.’”
Explaining how that ‘dirt’ eventually manifested itself, she added: “I pulled this Moog bass forward… we were like, ‘OK, that feels kind of trashy in this cool way but still really rich.’”
Lorde originally commented on What Was That?’s long gestation period in an Instagram video posted by Jim-E Stack, the song’s co-producer (Daniel Nigro and Lorde herself also get production credits). This was recorded, according to Stack, on “the night we finally got the drums right,” and concludes with Lorde turning the camera towards the What Was That Logic Pro session and indicating that they’d found the missing ingredient.
Elsewhere in the interview with Saunders, Lorde revealed that it was guesting on Charli XCX’s Girl, So Confusing remix that gave her the push she needed to finish her new album, Virgin, which will be released on 27 June.
"I never thought it would come out," she began. "I wrote this from the perspective of, 'well I could never say that’. It was just sort of an exercise in saying everything I needed to say about a whole lot of different stuff and I put off dealing with that. I was like, ‘that's for future Ella to deal with.’"
Hearing Charli XCX’s album, though, and getting the chance to address some of her insecurities and the two stars’ complex relationship on the remix, gave Lorde the confidence that she was on the right track.
"Brat coming out really gave me a kick," she says. "Meeting her in that place of rugged vulnerability and people responding really well to that, I was kind of like, 'OK cool - this is a good thing to be doing.'”
Lorde recently performed the Girl, So Confusing remix with Charli XCX at Coachella, and XCX has told her fans to get ready for a ‘Lorde summer’, a reference to her Brat hot spell in 2024.
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