We give this song the green light! Lorde dropped her first new music in three years on Thursday, March 2, and her new track, “Green Light,” is upbeat, catchy and electric.
The pop singer, 20, looks totally grown-up in the music video for the first single off her sophomore album, Melodrama. She lets loose and dances on top of an SUV, romps through the empty city streets and whips her hair around in the bathroom of a club. After a long night, she stands on a bridge at sunset in the final scene.
Although it’s a dance tune, the “Royals” songstress (real name Ella Yelich-O’Connor) revealed to Apple Beats 1 that it’s actually about heartbreak. “It took me a while to be able to figure out how to write about that. It was my first major heartbreak. And the song is really about those moments kind of immediately after your life changes and about all the silly little things that you gravitate towards,” she said. “I realized this is that drunk girl at the party dancing around crying about her ex-boyfriend who everyone thinks is a mess. That’s her tonight, and tomorrow she starts to rebuild. And that’s the song for me.” Lorde reportedly split from her photographer boyfriend James Lowe in late 2015 after nearly three years together.
The New Zealand-born-and-based singer-songwriter — who produced her new album with Jack Antonoff (a close pal and collaborator of her friend Taylor Swift) — also revealed why she stepped out of the spotlight after the massive success of her 2013 record, Pure Heroine. “It’s been a couple years since I’ve put anything out and really at least a couple years that I just dropped off the radar,” she said. “And for me it was kind of about processing what I want to say next, and I knew it just couldn’t be any old thing. It had to be really special and really singular, and it couldn’t sound the same as the old stuff ,and there was a lot of discovery that went on.”
The two-time Grammy winner added that she’s definitely matured since she shot to stardom at 16. “Everyone has that first year that feels like the first proper year of adulthood. I moved out of home, and all of a sudden I was kind of figuring out, Who am I when I’m alone? Who am I when I’m doing things just for myself?” she said. “And I feel like you can really hear that on this record.”
