Praise the Lorde: Her next album is on the horizon.
Lorde, 27, rocked a pair of AirPods Max headphones in photos uploaded via Instagram on Sunday, December 17. While lounging in pajamas on the floor, the singer (born Ella Yelich-O’Connor) noted in the caption that she was “listening to myself.”
Fans were quick to sound the alarm, jumping to conclusions in the comments section. “Mother is coming back,” one user wrote, while others added, “OH MY GOD” and “ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT WHEN.”
When one commenter said, “L4 SEASON IS UPON US,” Lorde stepped in to clarify. “We’re not CLOSE close(sic) you guys…,” she wrote. “I’m just getting so hype and needed to let u know.”
She also told fans they should “start [your] excitement on a low flame and bring it up to a gentle simmer” because she was “building stamina for this chapter.”
Lorde’s Instagram has been wiped of all but two posts. Along with the recent pajama pics, her feed features a gallery she uploaded on August 10, which shows her cheekily swimming in a pool in Oslo, Norway. “After the show, we went swimming,” she wrote. “These times are beautiful, and they freak me out, and there’s so much to tell you. No, this is not the start of anything out there, just want you to know there’s a light on inside me .. show it to you soon.”
In October, Lorde was spotted by a fan while riding the subway in New York City. “Anyway, I met Lorde yesterday and let her know that she wrote Melodrama for me specifically,” wrote the fan, who shared a photo of the twosome together. The “Royals” singer had her AirPods Max for the ride, a detail that didn’t go unnoticed by one fan account when resharing the photo.
“The last time she was [seen] with headphones in NYC trains in 2017, she was testing her own album,” wrote the account. Days after the post went up, Lorde commented, “I was, in fact, listening to myself.”
Lorde’s last album was 2021’s Solar Power, which reached No. 1 in her native New Zealand while peaking at No. 5 in the United States. The album got mixed reviews, with Rolling Stone saying that Solar Power “largely meanders through the anxiety, a bit of a relatable smooth brain approach to all that’s going on in the world.”
In September, Lorde shared an open letter via Tumblr in which she got candid about her health struggles. She wrote that her “body is really inflamed. It’s trying to tell me something, and I’m trying to support it, but nothing seems to help, and I get frustrated.” Lorde claimed her gut wasn’t “working properly,” that her skin “is worse than ever” and that she’s been “sick half a dozen times” this year.
She also wrote that she would translate this experience into her next album. “Every time I put something into words just as I see it, set it to the right music, a knot comes loose in me,” she noted. “But it hurts too, confronting the knots. I’ve made enough records to know that this feeling of my skin coming off is part of it.”
