Lorde was 18 when she was photographed for her 2015 Dazed cover. Even then, she was wise beyond her years, telling interviewer Lena Dunham about how, when she entered the music industry at just 13 years old, her sense of self was already “too permanent for anyone to fuck with.” Still, when Dazed reconnected with the Kiwi superstar for her latest cover story, launched today, a palpable maturity oozed out of her.
In the video above, Lorde crouches against a tree in Walthamstow Marshes as she talks Dazed through her personal universe, covering everything from her early struggles with acne (“in 2024, I decided to find myself beautiful with acne, instead of this thing I need to solve”); her obsession with DIY; and how her mother put her onto her favourite author, Annie Ernaux (if Lorde is already mother to many pop acolytes around the world, does that make Lorde’s mother our grandmother?).
In particular, the Auckland-born artist also breaks down the ideas behind her latest album, Virgin, released in June of this year. She explains that, for her, the concept is not so much based around ‘sexual purity’ as a broader purity, drawing on ancient mythological notions of ‘virginal’ to connote a “bothness of genders” and androgynous Gods. Elsewhere, she connects the term to virgin metals and virgin hair – “these substances that are just themselves.”
In the closing moments of the video, the new cover star also shares the story behind Virgin’s album artwork, which involved Lorde getting an X-ray scan of her pelvis. “It feels like a really mythical method of image-making,” she explains, adding: “It was a bit of a crazy mission. You can’t get an X-ray unless you have a medical reason so I don’t recommend you try and take one for your album!”
Watch the full interview in the video above.