Pop's queen of feuds: why Lorde keeps falling out with the world

In November 2019 singer Ella Yellich-O’Connor, aka 24 year-old Auckland-born pop star Lorde, revealed her new album had been delayed due to an unforeseen tragedy: the sudden death of her dog.

“I knew, in that way mothers do, that he was sicker than we had realised, and that we were nearing a point where his body wasn’t going to be able to cope,” she wrote on Instagram. “A light that was turned on for me has gone out… And it’s going to take some time and recalibration, now that there’s no shepherd ahead of me, to see what the work is going to be.”

As many will appreciate from experience, the loss of a pet can be anguishing and bring with it genuine grief. Still, it’s hard to imagine Madonna, Lady Gaga or even Taylor Swift postponing a record launch so that they could mourn the passing of a beloved pooch. They would doubtless plough on, dead doggie notwithstanding.

Here was one more reminder that Lorde, who this week finally resurfaced with her comeback single, Solar Power, is not like other pop stars. It may, in fact, help to think of her not as a pop star but as an avant-garde artist who just happens to be good at chart-conquering pop.

Quirky pop stars are all the rage, it is true. Billie Eilish owes more to Ministry than Mariah Carey. Olivia Rodrigo evokes in her music a bruised vision of adolescence straight out of TV series Euphoria. Ariana Grande has become a star despite never having written a song with a recognisable chorus. And with her Folklore and Evermore records, Taylor Swift has spent the past year pretending she lives in Tolkien’s The Shire (minus the hairy Hobbit feet).

Even amidst this company, though, Lorde is different. A child prodigy who claims to have read 1,000 books before the age of 13 and, as a teenager, helped her mother complete her PhD dissertation, she is a star with the soul of a dork.

She has also displayed a striking lack of decorum as she has proceeded through her stardom. In 2017 Lorde was accused of mocking the death of Whitney Houston when she captioned a picture of a bathtub with the Houston lyric “And iiii will always love you” (Houston having drowned in the bath).

Going one further that year, Lorde likened her friendship with Taylor Swift to an auto-immune disease, in that constant media attention meant there were places they could not go and things they could not do. This annoyed both Taylor Swift and those with compromised auto-immune systems: i.e. lots of people.

“I f----d up & that was really insensitive… I’m sorry,” Lorde tweeted. It wasn’t the first time she had nonplussed entire demographics. In 2013, shortly after her debut album, Pure Heroine, she suggested hip hop was not worthy of her time.

“Around the middle of last year I started listening to a lot of rap, like Nicki Minaj and Drake, as well as pop singers like Lana Del Rey,” Lorde observed. “They all sing about such opulence, stuff that just didn't relate to me – or anyone that I knew. I began thinking, “How are we listening to this? It's completely irrelevant”.”

Lorde’s relationship with rap music had by that point already been deemed “problematic”. Her debut single Royals initially broke through on rap and r'n'b radio in America (broadcasting in the US being hyper-segmented). The criticism was that the tune’s anti-bling message – the lyrics roll their eyes at the “gold teeth… Maybach… tigers on a gold leash” lifestyle – was an attack on hip hop, which has a history of glorifying extravagant spending.

“Unfortunately, urban radio embraced Royals despite the fact that Lorde’s critique of born-with-this wealth quickly devolved into a crude and offensive stereotyping of hip-hop culture,” went a piece in Spin magazine. “She came out against decade-old, rap-video signifiers like “gold teeth,” “Cristal,” and “Maybachs”.”

All of which is to say Lorde is 200 per cent more interesting than the average pop star. In addition to a fantastically unconventional voice (she sounds like a huskier Cocteau Twins) she possesses an ennui way beyond her years. Her 2013 tearjerker Ribs, for instance, is a meditation on the fleeting glories of youth, written by a 17-year-old ( I've never felt more alone/ It feels so scary getting old”).

And now, 18 months after her dog, Pearl, passed, she is back. Amid pandemonium on social media she unveiled the art-work for her new album, Solar Power – and then unleashed the single of the same name. The cover is a shot from below of Lorde’s legs and, frankly, her bottom, framed by the sun (the image has been altered for markets such as China so that you can see more sun than bum).

Even more striking is the track itself. It is timed to coincide with the recent solar eclipse and, in the very best sense, suggests Primal Scream’s Loaded and Come Together reinvented for Generation TikTok (with a dash of George Michael’s Freedom 90). The accompanying video meanwhile showcases one of Lorde’s other super-powers – her talent for terrible dancing.

There is, it should be said, a proud tradition of pop stars who can’t dance. From Taylor Swift to One Direction, awkward gyrating is a pop mainstay. Lorde, though, has elevated it to an art form – inspiring many, many think pieces with titles such as “Were Lorde’s Dance Moves Really That Bad On Saturday Night Live?” and “Why We Should Stop Making Fun of Lorde’s Dance Moves”

Should we stop making fun of Lorde’s dance moves? The answer can only be “yes” – as she is more than capable of making fun of them herself. Consider her performance at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards where, owing to a sudden onset of flu, she was unable to sing. Rather than cancel, she treated fans to a limb-flailing interpretation of hit Homemade Dynamite.

The VMAs are no stranger to eye-popping moments. This was where Britney Spears and Madonna had their notorious staged snog in 2003. And where Kanye West gate-crashed as Taylor Swift was receiving an award in 2009.

Lorde wiggling to Homemade Dynamite was right up there. She wobbled, she waved her arms, she pulled faces. Vox described it, unkindly but not inaccurately, as “a spastic style of dance that frequently looks like the marriage between a dark magician and a seizure”.

Again, it’s easy to be snide. But a case can be made that this is the pop equivalent of Kurt Cobain smashing his guitar or going on Top of the Pops singing Smells Like Teen Spirit in a funny voice. That Lorde is a pop star making up her own rules of engagement as she goes.

She also found herself in the gossip pages after her producer Jack Antonoff – with whom she worked on Solar Power – split from his girlfriend Lena Dunham in 2018.

Dunham and Lorde were friends – and social media accused Lorde of disloyalty when she and Antonoff were pictured together in her native New Zealand. The tabloids meanwhile speculated she and Antonoff were an item. Some fans even tweeted a blow-by-blow analysis of her 2017 album Melodrama, which they claimed confirmed she and Antonoff were together.

“I don't think anything happened between them. I can never know someone else's life,” said Dunham when asked about the speculation. “I have never spoken to Ella [Lorde] about it. We haven't talked since Jack [Antonoff] and I broke up. It was awful, and I couldn't do anything about it except trust that what he was saying to me was true.”

Do these controversies, fake or otherwise, shed any light on Lorde? Not really, which is what makes her such a fascinating star.

At the centre of her public persona is a huge inscrutable dark space. Her music is catchy but Lorde herself is elusive. Into that emptiness the internet has poured its tittle-tattle and its rumour-mongering. The greater her popularity, the more mysterious she seems. That mystique, as much as her often irresistible music, is surely essential to her appeal. And it raises the possibility that Lorde’s reign over the charts has only just begun.