Behind the Blissed-Out Comeback of Lorde

With this year’s release of her third studio album, Solar Power, pop star Lorde, 24, lights up the cover of the October issue of US Vogue, in nothing but a Schiaparelli breastplate.

Grammy winner Lorde, who was born Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, speaks with Rob Haskell for the magazine’s cover story profile about everything from cooking to her self-imposed media embargo; to the influences of Jenny Odell and her 2019 book How to Do Nothing; to her new engagement with the natural world.

For all its feel-good summer vibes, Solar Power can’t help but be a Lorde album, plaintive, nostalgic, tinted with loss and the uneasiness of change, Haskell writes.

“This music came from a very joyful period of life for me,” Yelich-O’Connor says. “I’m very comfortable in a place of vulnerability or contemplation of the future or my own mortality.”

Original article by Rob Haskell, US Vogue, September 8, 2021.

Photo by Théo de Gueltzl.