Lorde fans, your prayers have been answered: the musician is back. Last night (June 8), she updated her website with the artwork of her forthcoming third album, Solar Power, alongside the caption: “Arriving in 2021… patience is a virtue.”

Although Lorde’s been teasing her new album for years now, fresh rumours of her return were sparked last month, when she appeared as a headliner on Primavera Sound’s 2022 line-up.

This followed a newsletter sent to fans in May last year, in which Lorde explained that she was in the studio with collaborator Jack Antonoff in December 2019, before the world went into lockdown due to COVID-19. “It’ll take a while longer,” she said at the time, adding that “the work is so fucking good, my friend. I am truly jazzed for you to hear it”.

In October 2020, Lorde promised fans in New Zealand that she would release new music in 2021 if they voted in the country’s election – a promise she appears to have kept. “Do it for our beautiful country,” she said last year. “And next year I’ll give you something in return.” 

Solar Power will mark Lorde’s first release since 2017’s Melodrama, and comes months after she announced a forthcoming photo book documenting her travels in Antarctica in 2019. Titled GOING SOUTH, a release date is yet to be confirmed.

As well as literally breaking the internet, the new Lorde update has sparked mayhem among her followers, who are responding to the news with memes. See some of the best below, and look back at what Lorde has really been doing all these years here.