Lorde has been relatively quiet after wrapping up her Solar Power tour — and it turns out she’s been struggling through a challenging year.
“I’m living with heartbreak again. It’s different but the same,” Lorde, 26, wrote in an open letter to fans shared via her Tumblr page on Wednesday, September 20. “I ache all the time, I forget why and then remember. I’m not trying to hide from the pain, I understand now that pain isn’t something to hide from, that there’s actually great beauty in moving with it. But sometimes I’m sick of being with myself.”
Lorde didn’t specify exactly what she’s been dealing with but hinted that she’s been facing some physical ailments over the past few months. “My 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,” she wrote. “My gut isn’t working properly, my skin is worse than ever, I’ve gotten sick half a dozen times. I realized earlier this year that listening to my body is hard for me, it’s something I never really learned how to do.”
She went on to note that she recently stopped taking a “little yellow pill” that she’d been taking every day since she was 15. “Gonna see how it goes,” she added, noting that she pulled out of plans to attend Paris Fashion Week later this month because she didn’t want to “be one of the people in the light smiling if it wasn’t real.”
The good news is that Lorde hinted she may pour some of these feelings into new music. Her most recent album, Solar Power, dropped in August 2021.
“It might seem funny or be easy to forget, but I make records because I need to,” she told her fans. “Every time I put something into words just as I see it, set it to the right music, a knot comes loose in me. 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. I know I’m gonna look back on this year with fondness and a bit of awe, knowing it was the year that locked everything into place, the year that transitioned me from my childhood working decade to the one that comes next — one that even through all this, I’m so excited for. It’s just hard when you’re in it.”
Lorde has previously been open about needing to take time for herself between albums and the relentless touring and promotional schedules that come with each release. “The question I’ve gotten a lot recently is, ‘What have you been doing?’” she told The New York Times in 2021 when reflecting on her four-year break after releasing 2017’s Melodrama. “I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, no — this is a break from my life.’ I come back and perform these duties because I believe in the album.”
