When it comes to her rabid fans, Lorde knows how to drop just the right amount of information that will keep them baying for more. In a recent interview with the New Zealand magazine Ensemble, the singer revealed that the follow-up to 2021’s Solar Power is already in the works.

“It has taken me quite a while [to start working on it],” the 26-year-old told the magazine. “I do just take a long time… I do a lot of research, I write a lot down.” To many, this information won’t come as a surprise – Lorde’s extremely studious approach to her craft meant that Solar Power’s release came a full four years after her second album, 2017’s Melodrama.

When asked if fans can expect the same length of time before her next offering, Lorde gives a coy yet hopeful response. Although there’s a “big chunk of work before I actually start writing music”, the singer goes on to say that “it’s always my intention to move as quickly as I fucking can, and then that ends up taking different forms. But this one, I really am trying to. I don’t want to wait.” And when pressed on whether the album could drop this year, Lorde simply replies “anything could happen”. 

Elsewhere in the interview, Lorde reflects on the fan reaction to her third album Solar Power, which was decidedly more mixed than her first two. “Obviously some people liked it, some people didn’t like it,” she says matter of factly, before revealing that at the end of the Melodrama album cycle she felt “really spooked” by the fact that “people believed in [her] too much”. In response to this overwhelming feeling, she switched up her sound, and it paid off. “To sort of go down this weird road and for people to have absolutely no idea what’s going to come next, that is super cool to me”, she added. Although the fan response to the album may have been mixed, Lorde’s purposeful change of direction well and truly reclaimed the narrative, and in that sense, Solar Power was an undoubted success.

Lorde will embark on the New Zealand and Australian leg of The Solar Power Tour from February 21-March 4.

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