Lorde, 23, is famous for staying relatively off the grid (her last Instagram post is dated April 2018). So, fans were more than overjoyed when she emerged from the woodworks to send a rare update to fans on her email list on May 19, which contained big news. The Grammy-winning singer teased that she’s working on a “new thing,” which fans could only infer was her long-anticipated third album that had originally been delayed!
“I started going back to the studio again in December, just for something to do, and to my surprise, good things came out. Happy, playful things. I felt my melodic muscles flexing and strengthening. [Music producer and The Bleachers frontman] Jack [Antonoff] came over to work in the studio in Auckland, and I went to LA. It flowed. A thing started to take shape. And then, of course, the world shut down,” Lorde wrote in the email while quarantining in her home country of New Zealand, according to a screenshot of the email that fan account @lordestars posted on Instagram. Despite the unexpected roadblock the pandemic caused, Lorde assured, “We’re still working away — jack and I FaceTimed for over an hour this morning going over everything.” Unfortunately, this new project will ‘take a while longer,” the pop princess admitted.
Lorde promised fans that the wait will be worth it. “I want nothing more than to feed you treats, pop perfect morsels straight into your little mouths. But as I get older I realise there’s something to be said for the pleasant feeling of waiting for something of quality to become available to you,” she continued in the email blast, adding, “I can tell you, this new thing, it’s got its own colours now. If you know anything about my work, you’ll know what that means.”
Lorde last hit the road for her Melodrama World Tour, which wrapped in Nov. 2018. Touching on why she pumped the breaks on doing back-to-back concerts, Lorde explained in her email, “I know I needed a break from touring at the the end of the last cycle. I was finding the combination of brutal stage fright and having no fixed home and no connection what what I ate or where I lived extremely grim.” However, Lorde admitted she was “excited” to “get back out there” and to “be playing festivals again.”
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Fans saw this as the salvation the world needed, considering the current circumstances overwhelming it. “The queen is coming to save the world [crying emojis] I cant waittt,” one fan gushed on Twitter, while another wrote, “lorde is back, a new era is upon us.” Fans have been patiently waiting for this new era, since the release of Lorde’s second album Melodrama in June of 2017 (which Jack also helped produce).
Lorde’s third album was delayed when her dog, Pearl, unexpectedly died after two cardiac arrests. The singer revealed the heartbreaking news in an email blast in Nov. 2019, writing, “I need some time to see the good again, to finish making this [album] for you. It won’t be the same work — as anyone who has felt loss can understand, there’s a door that opens that you step through, and everything is different on the other side.”