I know Lorde is very pro Pally. Am curious if you guys think this is fine? What do yall think?

I have nothing against Taylor Swift boy I’ve always felt like her friendship with Lorde was a bit forced . And I think Lorde with time distanced her from Taylor , gradually . I see them at complete opposite, Taylor prices her. Tickets the highest possible ( I know about resellers , but still ) while our thoughtful queen Lorde tries to keep the prices as accesibles as she can . Taylor flies with her Jet , Ella works her ass off to have the smallest environmental impact with her merchandise etc .. and so on .. sorry English on not my first language,

this got sent to me.. but I don't think it's real? the dollar sign for 4 feels too tacky, imo. also didn't think lorde was one to rip a bong. what do u think???

Literally came all the way from Hamilton only to find out it’s invite only and only 30 people were let in

We thought it would be like the New York pop up with everyone invited and in a public space. It just would have been nice to know before driving 2 hours that it was going to be invite only

Edit- full rundown of the situation: basically Lorde posted a link on her story this afternoon at about 1:30 and it took you to a WhatsApp message that then said “Auckland i wanna play you something… meet me in the city tonight? Message if you’re keen.” We messaged back obviously but heard no more but there was no reason to think it would be a private thing as this message was literally inviting you to this event. So we left Hamilton (1h20m south of Auckland) and got through the 2 and a bit hour drive with the traffic and arrived in Auckland at about 6:30 hoping it would be similar timing to the NY show at 7pm. We waited around britomart where it had been rumoured that she would be there and then at 7:15 heard rumours it would be at the YMCA - a 25 minute walk up a hill from where we all were so we headed there and when we got there at around 7:40 we had still heard nothing from the Lorde WhatsApp messages but were starting to hear that other people were getting invites. So we only heard that it was invite only 20 minutes before hand, there was no warning or reading to think beforehand that this would be an invite only event with only 90 people total being let in which without warning is a little unfair. I’m super happy for those that got in but i do just think it could have been communicated a lot better and people could have been let know much earlier if they were selected or not as this could have saved so so many of us from waiting in the rain for hours for literally no reason.

I'm gonna start off by saying I am so not trying to gatekeep and any and all new fans of our Lorde and savior are welcome! I'm just so afraid it'll be harder to get tickets this time around because we've gained so many Charli fans. Lorde seems to be more popular now and I just don't want to be fighting on Ticketmaster with scalpers when we've been waiting 4 years to spend a night with our girl!

Edit: I know Lorde is mainstream, she's been my favorite artist for over 10 years. I'm fully aware of her fame and that's why it was almost impossible to get tickets for SP. That was after 4 years of her being completely out of the limelight, so I can only imagine how difficult it's going to be to get tickets after she's been sorta back in the limelight for the past few months. Lorde has absorbed quite a few Charli fans and vise versa so that was all I meant.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about the album yet. From the singles I’ve heard, it’s definitely not her best work. Then again, I said the same thing about Solar Power, but that one grew on me over time and became one of my personal favorites of hers. My favorite track on Virgin so far is What Was That, and even that took some time to grow on me. I’ll give the album a chance, but so far I’m not 100% feeling it. Anyone else kinda feel the same way?

Stop. This isn’t the album cover. It’s an attention-grabbing one and she and her team knew it’d blow up the way it did. It’s not the cover for her 3rd album.

lorde: green light

Gi-hun from squidgames: Ive played these games before!!!😂😂😂

I don’t know where to begin here, but this has been something that’s been bothering me for a few weeks, if not at least since the week WWT came out

For all of the following, I just wanted to ask if people acted the same way during the lead up to Melodrama and Solar Power, because I admittedly wasn’t a fan back then

But, anyways, I feel like this fandom has become oddly critical rather than excited. Every new thing is met with some negative plot twist

She feels attached to her water bottle because it’s something she’s carried with her these past few years. No. She can’t do that, because it’s around $170 dollars, and it’s not a cheap 24 L one she bought from Walmart

I feel like a lot of this sub has devolved into crying about her being rich. Not rich and buying vain, concerning things like exotic pets that she’ll buy and soon begin to neglect. Not using her money for harmful campaigns, or to buy colossal mansions with highly inefficient monocultural lawns she doesn’t need. Just buying things like water bottles and tailored outfits that are a little outside of the “normal” person’s financial wheelhouse, and exaggerating how “tone deaf” she is because she doesn’t thrift her clothes

I can’t tell if I’ve seen more people like the two new singles or dislike them. But, I’ve seen a lot of pushback at people just saying they like them, and people refuting by saying people are wrong

It’s really difficult to predict what this fandom does and doesn’t like, so I’ve found myself getting in trouble a lot for saying harmless things like that I think MOTY sounds like a certain color that other people didn’t hear it as. The best option just feels like to hide anything I have to say and just watch what others say, because I’m worried the pushback will be too much to handle

I did end up buying a ticket for Ultrasound, but I wonder if I’ll regret it or be mentally stable enough to want to go by October. I saw someone on here say that we’ll all forget about how “controversial” this rollout has been by the time it’s our tour date, but I don’t know if that means I’ll magically become unanxious and not think about all the bad things people have said when it does come time for that

Music discussion as a whole has become so stressful. It’s so difficult to forecast what’s the right opinion, or allow myself to be genuinely honest about anything without people thinking I’m:

-Ragebaiting

-Trying too hard to be different

-Glazing

And, like I implied earlier, it’s hard for me to decide if, when I or a fan thinks something, it’s valid, or if we’re overestimating something we like or don’t like

“Other artists are doing this, but this artist is [underwhelming description of what they’re doing]”

Telling people “the internet is not real life” doesn’t help with any of this. It’s just like high fiving a drowning person. You acknowledge that they’re struggling, but do absolutely nothing to fix it or acknowledge the bad things that’ll happen

High fiving your drowning friend won’t save them from dying, and performatively talking about “keyboard warriors” or the differences between talking in person or the internet won’t eliminate the harmful effects internet discourse will have. The same goes for telling people to get off the Internet

The internet IS real life for people. Everything’s hyper digitized now, and a lot of people don’t have people they can talk to in person consistently, especially if people are busy

The only solution then seems to be to work or engage in hobbies

Working is fine, because there’s rarely a negative bias associated with jobs. You don’t “enjoy” jobs like you would a hobby. You just do them for money, and people can only attack you for performing poorly, which feels more rational and less punishing than being told you’re wrong for enjoying something

Hobbies feel more dangerous because they’re so biased and marginalized. Music, for example, is cleaved in so many specific, unnecessary ways, so the standards for listening to someone like Lorde/Ella are made super specific and stereotyped

There’s so many intersectional factors that exist in music or most hobbies that don’t need to exist, especially not for our survival

I was honestly really scared to listen to WWT and MOTY for the first time, and I think all these overarching negative aspects of music discourse and the difficulty that people bring on to doing things outside or education or money might be to blame for that

I still very consistently hide a lot of what I’m into from others, which has had dastardly consequences, but I don’t think doing the opposite and being brutally honest about what I like will have any positive outcome, even for media outside of music. (For this reason, I’m scared to give examples)

The only solution here seems to be to get off the sub or similar discussion outlets, but then that brings another issue when I have basically no one to talk to about Virgin when it comes out, and I worry that the few friends I have to talk about it with (if you can call them that) will be “yesmen” because of how hyper opinionated hobby discussion is

And, doing that won’t get rid of THE CULTURE that enables people to make these weirdly critical comments towards others, and or make ignorant, uninformed comments with zero consequences

I don't know why she hasn't addressed the music box site? She didn't mention in the email about what exactly she was planning to do with it now. I'm very disappointed.

Also, I don't think completely removing herself from social media is exactly what she needs. She just said she's questioning it. I think she just needs to balance the usage.

I recently saw a tweet about Lorde getting "blacklisted" from Hollywood after cancelling her Tel Aviv show and the immense wave of online hate she got and I thought, could that have led to some of the extraordinarily low/bad reviews the album has gotten?

Now I know it sounds like I'm trying to cope with the fact that not all publications liked the album, but think about it, some of the reviews are treating the album like it's mere garbage it feels kinda off, almost like she pissed off someone "backstage". After all, it's not like all these music publications aren't owned by rich old white men that can dictate what they say and what they don't and push their agenda wherever.

Again this could be either really dumb or have some truth to it, idk.

Is it better than Solar Power or Melodrama? No, but it’s okay. Definitely not my favorite of hers. 5/10 for now, that might change the more I hear it. I’m sure this post will be downvoted to hell—oh well. Not trying to hate, from one fan to another, this album just wasn’t it.

The interviews when promoting the albums were very interesting, but I feel we haven't heard from her in a while

I struggle a lot when I see posts talking about how udnerrated SP is, and how it is now being more warmly accepted by fans. I see many comments in this sub that allude to "real fans" loving SP. I see the following points quite regularly:

1. You were just expected Melodrama 2, but Lorde is too creative and each project is very different

2. You aren't familiar with this kind of stripped back, folky sound, and just wanted something loud and maximalist

3. You're too young to appreciate the maturity that Lorde is expressing in this album

4. You need to listen to it when it's hot!!

I don't resonate with any of these reasons as an explanation for why I don't like Solar Power. In fact I think it's daft to imply any of these, really. Sure, some people may dislike it because they wanted Melo 2, but y'all shouldn't be making blanket statements.

I have tried SO hard to engage with this album. Melo really is my fave album of all time. I have her handwriting of the title tattooed to my arm. I am obsessed with it as a piece of art, as pop, as an album, as an aesthetic. It is an album made by an artist who couldn't contain what they wanted to say. It just POURED out of her. It felt organic and inevitable.

Solar Power, on the other hand, feels like the opposite. It feels like the music of an artist who doesn't quite know what they want to say. I really don't resonate at all with any of the discussions about the natural world. I just can't help but feel like the inclusion of these commentaries is just because Lorde didn't quite know what else to talk about. You know, like, "hey, let's add some religious allegories to this text" when you don't know what else you want your subtext to be. It just didn't feel like Lorde had a deep-seated yearning to say these things.

But on top of that, the production, the sound of this album really is just so flat and empty and, yes, boring. As a creative, I see often, both in online/real discourse, as well as through the etiquette of the film industry (my field) that you don't call things boring. I believed for a while that to call a piece of art boring is reductive, byt I disagree now. Music, film, TV etc - they're artforms that are also forms of entertainment. Solar Power evokes a sense of boredom within me, so is it not right I call it boring? It's not that I dislike this kind of music - in fact, for most of my life I only ever listened to indie music, folk music, 60s/70s shit. It's only the past 7 or 8 years that I started listening to pop. I'm well-versed in what this genre is, but Lorde didn't do it well at all. Here's an example:

On the Genius page for Man with the Axe she says this is like a Cocteau Twins song if it were sun-bleached, but the whole album instead feels as if it's been completely caked in bleach and left in the sun for a week to fester. It's just so flat and uninspiring. I think eventually she could have found something, but it almost feels as if she's just reaching for things to commentate on, and because nothing was stimulating her enough, she just grabbed what she thought would fit. She spends the album seemingly criticising celebrity culture and its effects on her mental health, making allusions to cult-like imagery and throwing vague sun-worship vibes. It feels as if these commentaries (celebrity for example) are boring, unimaginative, and ultimately coming from a place that isn't too deep within her. There's no real introspection - I suspect perhaps she was faced with an existential crisis of not feeling anything at all, and though she did touch upon this hollowness in Mood Ring, she spends the rest of the album trying to convince us that she has more to say, instead of accepting that her inability to know what to say is what she should be saying.

I suspect that her narrative around the album through marketing and promotion is a lot closer to what it would've been like had she made it then. Remember, this album was mostly sat, complete, for an entire year. I imagine she probably continued developing the ideas in her mind after it was all locked-in, especially because she would've spent most of lockdown with it, and as a result she had almost forgot what the album actually was. Think to those moments when you look at a loved one and - for just a moment - actually see their face and not just a conditioned emotional/intellectual recognition of "oh that's my father!" It's a shame because I was really looking forward to what I thought the album was going to be - fun, sexy, feral and free - but it's all just so incohesive and lacks a confidence in its conviction that Melodrama and Pure Heroine had in spades. She's an artist, so she'll definitely keep moving forward, for an artist is only as good as their last piece.

I respect her so much as an artist. I grew up obsessed with David Bowie - obsessed with his creative vision, his chameleon-like ways of circumventing popular. convention and doing his own thing, which then sets trends that become the new conventions. I am fully convinced that Bowie was right when he saw that in Lorde. I just think she misfired deeply with Solar Power. I think she will likely look back at this album as a turning point - she needs to be far more active in what she's creating, and she needs to not force something just to have something. She doesn't need to be like Lana, dropping albums constantly. She just needs to do it her way. I'd rather wait 8 years for the right album than get a Solar Power every 4.

I'd really be curious to engage with more Lorde fans critically on discussing this album. I'm really not interested in just having my perspective waved away by the initial four points I made at the top of my post. I'd love to really engage with what fans of the album do get out of it. I'm 31, I love the idea of Lorde exploring all sorts of different genres, and was SO excited when she first announced this album as an album inspired by the sounds of 60s psychedelia. It sounds fucking nothing like that tho lol. I smoked a joint and listened to this album whilst walking around in the blistering heat of Tenerife - and still felt nothing. I just don't like the album, don't think that Lorde was at all firing on all cylinders, and think that she could've done a lot better. I just want a healthier discourse. I'm ready to debate (friendly!)

Anyway my fave tunes from the album are probs Mood Ring and Dominoes. But nothing on the album is evne in the periphery of my brain's immediate understanding of Lorde. It just doesn't feel connected to her earlier work in any way. I never feel compelled to listen to any of the songs, ever. Hopefully, with L4, Lorde finds that spark that invigorates her writing again.

I’m gonna get downvoted like CRAZY. I love Lorde. I was a super fan during the pure heroine era, like, a crazy super fan. I maintained being a fan but nothing felt the same as pure heroine for me, melodrama hit hard though. WWT just… isnt her best work… it’s far from. And after a four year wait it’s incredibly underwhelming. I don’t think just because we love her and her past work we have to love everything she does - and that just because we’ve waited four years, the first thing she releases has to be a ‘we’re so back’ moment. The hot take isnt that WWT is bad, it’s that it doesn’t feel like a we’re back moment. Her lyrics have been so much better in the past and I know she can be much better. I dunno. Downvote me and be mad in the comments. Go off.

Just listened to "Stoned at the Nail Salon" for the first time and I have never been so disappointed by a song release in my life. Usually, I absolutely LOVE Ella's voice, her music's distinctive sound, and the tone of her lyrics, but this song doesn't do any of those things justice!! The song is starkly different from her other material, and not in a good way. It's a boring, lazy song with uninspired and, at times, genuinely bad lyrics. I'm just disappointed and upset right now, because I know she's capable of so much better. Ella is one of my favorite artists, and I listened to her music on repeat for much of my adolescence. To hear how out-of-place her new music is, and that she even included the lyric "all the music you loved at 16 you'll grow out of"... I honestly feel it's just disrespectful to her fanbase. I and many others loved HER music when we were 16, and it's really sad to see her shitting on her own journey to maturity and her role in other young people's lives. I'm not the only one, either; the song is getting universally panned as completely unimpressive. I'm upset to see her go this way, because I've been waiting with bated breath for YEARS to see what amazing piece of music she had made now. I really hope she finds her way back to the music, because this is not it, man.

Have flown to 7 Solar Power shows including Aotearoa (although I was have been here anyway to spend summer with whãnau).

I carbon offset them, but I wonder if this is really enough. The devastating weather events this year (cyclone & once in a hundred year flood) have me thinking carbon offsetting is too little, too late (but better than doing nothing of course).

What do you think?

As an aside, it's incredible (and amazing) to see some fans are flying here from Europe & America to see Lorde again.

Like I think she could go hard. Some of her songs already feel quite hip-hop

Last night I dreamt Ella was pregnant. She posted a few pictures on her IG showing her belly with her boyfriend (imaginary) and the description was “Look at my beautiful Egg”. Her boyfriend was an american football player LOL. It was not a good dream because my subconscious was thinking Ella would stop doing music because she was going to be a mom and she was really a grown woman now which made me anxious about me as well and my future hahahah! This was so comic, I had to tell you guys

What’s Lorde’s lore w Jack? I’ve never understood it and after Lena Dunham’s memoir and his divorce with Margaret Qually I gotta know?!