Lorde achieves the green light and runs out of the car that was taking her in her video clip to roam the streets of New York in her long-awaited return, What Was That, waking up from the dream and finding her place in the city. She had already announced it to us a few hours before the premiere in a WhatsApp audio she recorded after stepping out of the shower — it’s the time of her rebirth and for us to cry again on the dance floors.
The song functions like the lovechild of Supercut and Perfect Places, two of the most acclaimed tracks from her second album, Melodrama. The lyrics cry out between reality and delirium, missing the first and best times, yet accepting that she must say goodbye to them. In its chorus, where she makes her unbridled emotion ours, she also references her life when her debut, Pure Heroine, came out, bidding farewell to that era with the same intensity that launches this new one.
The video is reminiscent of the first from Melodrama, evoking the close-up of her face — now less enduring, more liberated by lived experiences and the redemption she achieved with her third full-length, Solar Power. In it she runs off wearing the same outfit and down the same Manhattan streets where she was when she posted the snippet of the song that launched her TikTok account, ending up with her fan family who made her feelings their own in a packed Washington Square Park just over 24 hours before the song’s release. Realising that, contrary to what she didn’t know but we all did, she is indeed famous, and her synth-pop poetics will carry her to glory.
The first teaser of the Lorde Summer, produced by Jim E-Stack (Charli xcx, Haim) and Dan Nigro (Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo), says goodbye but, above all, greets the memories that defined us and will always be present — and whether they are bright or dark, Lorde will be with us to bring them out whenever we need, shouting at them until we lose our voice: WHAT WAS THAT!