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    Billie Eilish, Lorde and More Are Singing Out About Body Image

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    Billie Eilish, Charli XCX and Lorde are among a group of young women who are revealing, in their music, the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taken together, the first two song titles on Billie Eilish’s third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” form a provocative pair: “Skinny” and “Lunch.”“People say I look happy/Just because I got skinny,” Eilish sings on the opener, her melancholic croon accompanied by a single, murky guitar. “But the old me is still me and maybe the real me,” she adds, “and I think she’s pretty.”That lyric is a gut punch. It’s also indicative of a subtle shift among the current generation of female pop stars, who have recently been acknowledging — often in stark, striking and possibly triggering language — the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taylor Swift, who first opened up about her past struggles with disordered eating in a powerful sequence in her 2020 documentary, “Miss Americana,” sings about it on her 2022 track “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” a compassionate ode to her younger self: “I hosted parties and starved my body, like I’d be saved by the perfect kiss.” Last month, in a guest appearance on the remix of Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” Lorde confessed that fluctuations in her weight had led her to stay out of the public eye. “For the last couple years, I’ve been at war in my body,” she sings, heartbreakingly. “I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back.”For several years, conversations about weight in mainstream pop have centered around an artist bold enough to speak up about it and absorb the stinging backlash: Lizzo. In her lyrics, on social media, and in her shapewear line, the singer and rapper has played up self-love, becoming a face of the body positivity movement. Earlier this year, however, she told The New York Times that she had “evolved into body neutrality.” “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.Part of the vitriol Lizzo has faced is rooted in racism, and it is impossible to divorce a dialogue about body image from race, and the different ways Black, brown and white bodies are dissected, denigrated and idolized. Latto recently spoke out about how online criticism led her to have plastic surgery at 21 to enhance her buttocks. Last year the rapper, who is biracial, said, “When I didn’t have my surgery, they’re like, ‘Oh, she shaped like her white side.’” SZA, speaking to Elle about her own, similar, procedure (which she sang about on her hit 2022 album, “SOS”), said, “I didn’t succumb to industry pressure. I succumbed to my own eyes in the mirror.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charli XCX and Lorde End the Rumors on a Refreshing Remix

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      Lorde adds guest vocals to Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” a song that muses on the complexities of female friendship, and helps create something revelatory.To a lot of people these days, “ambivalent pop music” is an oxymoron. Catchy hooks tend to streamline complex emotions into universal, legible sentiments, temporarily dividing the world into teams: the heartbreakers vs. the victims, the happy vs. the sad, the boys vs. the girls. Infectious as they are, many of the songs on Charli XCX’s incisive sixth album, “Brat,” refuse to take sides, making them difficult to discuss in the explainer-generating, SEO-baiting grammar of modern pop standom. How refreshing.Charli never mentioned Lorde by name on the album’s knotty ninth track, “Girl, So Confusing,” but all signs pointed to her being the somewhat socially awkward, poetry-loving doppelgänger to whom the song is addressed. (“People say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair,” Charli sings, winking at those of us who remember when an interviewer asked her about writing Lorde’s “Royals.”)It was less clear how we were supposed to understand this song in the limited and polarized language of 2020s musical fandom, which pits female pop stars against one another like pro athletes while still insisting that they “support women” at all times with a benevolent grin. “Sometimes I think you might hate me, sometimes I think I might hate you,” Charli babbles atop a strobe-lit A.G. Cook beat, one of the many “wait, are you even allowed to say that anymore?” moments on “Brat.” The song strains the vocabulary of clickbait. Is this a “diss track” or the start of a “feud”? Are the girlies fighting? And if they are, what could Lorde possibly be doing in the V.I.P. section of Charli’s recent show?It’s complicated, and — blessedly — so is the surprise remix on which Lorde appears, firing off her first new lyrics in three years. After Charli unloads her feelings and projections in that first verse, Lorde responds with the run-on intensity of a late-night voice note: “You’d always say, ‘let’s go out,’ but then I’d cancel last minute,” the New Zealander confesses, “I was so lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures.” She then reveals, devastatingly, that she’s been “at war with my body,” insecure about fluctuations in her weight, and that the enigmatic aura she’s created is actually a stifling defense mechanism. That she does it all so succinctly in a cadence that effortlessly matches Cook’s beat should make everyone excited for her next album, whenever it arrives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Post Malone and the Weeknd’s Emo Synth-Pop, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Jenny Lewis, TNGHT, Dawn Richard and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Post Malone and the Weeknd, ‘One Right Now’Oh, the fragile male ego. “Don’t call me baby when you did me so wrong” is one of the milder jibes hurled at a straying girlfriend by Post Malone as he trades verses with the Weeknd. She may want to get together, but the guys have already moved on, with “one coming over and one right now.” A very 1980s track — springy synthesizer bass line and hook, programmed beat — carries pure, focused resentment about how much damage she’s done to “my feelings.” JON PARELESCharli XCX featuring Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek, ‘New Shapes’“What you want/I ain’t got it,” Charli XCX snarls over a blast of ’80s pop gloss. The British pop provocateur unleashes her ultrapop persona, brooding over cinematic new wave synths. “New Shapes” leverages the kind of vulnerability and insecurity that defines some of Charli’s best work, thanks to pointed verses from her guests (and previous collaborators), the sad girl supergroup of Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek. The whole thing doesn’t quite measure up to the irresistible drama of the beloved 2019 anthem “Gone,” but hey, the girls will take it. ISABELIA HERRERATerrace Martin featuring Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Ty Dolla Sign and James Fauntleroy, ‘Drones’The polymathic musician and producer Terrace Martin is widely known for helping Kendrick Lamar sculpt his jazz-tinted masterpiece, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” but he’d been an asset in Los Angeles studios since the mid-2000s, when he first fell in with Snoop Dogg. The title track from Martin’s new solo album, “Drones,” is something like a reading of his résumé, with features from four resounding names in L.A. hip-hop. The dapper, G-funk beat is a braid of plunky guitar, pulsing electric piano and 808 percussion; the lyrics — sung partly by Lamar, in a sly shrug — describe a booty-call relationship that’s exactly as shallow as it looks to the outside world, and maybe not much more satisfying. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODawn Richard, ‘Loose Your Mind’Following her eclectic album “The Second Line,” released earlier this year, Dawn Richard’s new track for the Adult Swim Singles series is all bass-heavy, aqueous funk. Her voice shape-shifts throughout “Loose Your Mind,” so at times it almost feels like she’s duetting with different sides of her prismatic personality. “Ain’t really nothing wrong when the feeling is golden,” she spits at the beginning, before a melodic chorus of Dawns responds in agreement: “Solid gold.” LINDSAY ZOLADZTNGHT, ‘Tums’Few songs defined the hypermaximalist sound of the 2010s as succinctly as the electronic duo TNGHT’s “Higher Ground,” that brassy, ever-escalating EDM anthem that was sampled by Kanye West on “Yeezus” and — I will die on this hill — has to be the inspiration behind the “Arby’s: We Have the Meats” jingle, right? After a long hiatus, the producers Hudson Mohawke and Lunice reunited as TNGHT in 2019, and have now released a new track called “Tums,” which Lunice says was created according to the duo’s guiding principles: “Keep it really fun. Dumb. Hard-hitting. Don’t overwork it.” Sampled giggles and slide whistles keep things fizzy on the surface, while the track’s booming low end guides it through a series of roller-coaster drops. “Tums” might not be as innovative as the pair’s earlier work, but maybe that’s because everything else has been sounding like them for years now. ZOLADZSimi, ‘Woman’With “Woman,” the Nigerian singer and songwriter Simi offers a tribute, corrective and update to Fela Anikalupo Kuti, who invented Afrobeat in the 1970s in songs including “Lady,” which scoffed at European feminism. “Woman” mixes current electronic Afrobeats with the funk of Kuti’s 1970s Afrobeat, while quoting Kuti songs between her own assertions about women’s strengths: “She won’t pay attention to the intimidation.” The rhetoric is tricky; the beat is unstoppable. PARELESGregory Porter featuring Cherise, ‘Love Runs Deeper’The standard elements of Gregory Porter’s style run through “Love Runs Deeper”: lyrics that linger on the difficulties — and the bounties — of care and connection; twinkling orchestral strings; a gradual build that allows his burly, baritone voice to unfurl itself with just enough tension and release. But this is more of a direct-delivery power ballad than most of Porter’s tunes: The melody wouldn’t feel out of place on an Adele or Halsey record, and it’s liable to get lodged in your head quickly and stay there. With supporting vocals from the young British singer Cherise, “Love Runs Deeper” serves as the soundtrack to Disney’s annual holiday-season advertisement, which this year is a short film (full of self-referential touches, like a Buzz Lightyear cameo) titled “The Stepdad.” The song is also included on a new Porter compilation, “Still Rising,” which features a mix of his greatest hits, B-sides and new songs. RUSSONELLOJenny Lewis, ‘Puppy and a Truck’“My 40s are kicking my ass, and handing them to me in a margarita glass” — how’s that for an opening line? Something about the gentle country strum and laid-back croon of Jenny Lewis’s new stand-alone single recalls her old band Rilo Kiley’s great 2004 album “More Adventurous,” though her perspective has been updated with the unglamorous realities and hard-won wisdom of middle age. After chronicling the wreckage of a few recent relationships, the eternally witty Lewis arrives at a mantra of tough-talking self-reliance: “If you feel like giving up, shut up — get a puppy and a truck.” ZOLADZChastity Belt, ‘Fear’Lydia Lund spends much of the Washington indie-rock band Chastity Belt’s new song “Fear” hollering until she’s hoarse, “It’s just the fear, it’s just the fear.” Apparently she recorded the vocals while she was staying at her parents’ house, and her commitment to the song was so intense that her mother knocked on the door to make sure she was OK because she “thought I was doing some kind of primal scream therapy,” Lund said. “And I guess in a way I am.” Lund’s impassioned delivery and the song’s soaring guitars turn “Fear” into a cathartic response to overwhelming anxiety, and provide a powerful soundtrack for slaying that dreaded mind killer. ZOLADZRadiohead, ‘Follow Me Around’“Kid A Mnesia,” the new, expansive compilation of Radiohead songs from their paradigm-shifting sessions in 1999-2000, has unearthed studio versions of songs that the band performed but never committed to albums, notably “Follow Me Around,” a guitar-strumming crescendo of paranoia. The video, apparently made with a small but persistent camera drone, nicely multiplies the dread. PARELESLorde, ‘Hold No Grudge’Lorde whisper-sings through the first half of “Hold No Grudge,” a bonus track added to her album “Solar Power.” It’s a memory of an early love that ended without a resolution; later messages went unanswered. Midway through, she’s still bouncing syllables off guitar strums, but the sound of the song comes into focus and Lorde realizes, “We both might have done some growing up.” She’s ready to let the passage of time offer solace. PARELESOmar Apollo featuring Kali Uchis, ‘Bad Life’Omar Apollo is known for combining cool funk grooves, slick charisma and sensual falsettos. But on “Bad Life,” his new single featuring Kali Uchis, the young singer-songwriter peels back the layers and puts his armor aside for a bare-bones exercise in vulnerability. “Bad Life” revels in contempt, burning slow and low alongside a soft-focus electric guitar. Apollo opens the track with a heart-piercer: “You give me nothing/But I still change it to something.” Ouch. The singer’s voice curls into anguished melismas, and when the orchestral strings soar in halfway through, the resentment cuts crystal clear. HERRERAAlt-J, ‘Get Better’Alt-J created a serene and almost unbearably mournful song with “Get Better,” a fingerpicked chronicle about the profundity and mundanity of a loved one’s slow death like Paul Simon’s “Darling Lorraine” and Mount Eerie’s “Real Death.” It’s profoundly self-conscious, citing the similarly acoustic arrangement of Elliott Smith; it offers personal moments, stray events, reminiscences, belongings, thoughts of “front line workers,” admissions that “I still pretend you’re only out of sight in another room/smiling at your phone.” The loss is only personal, but shattering. PARELES More

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      Bringing Attention to the Maori Language, One Song at a Time

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      “Waiata/Anthems,” Lorde’s “Te Ao Marama” EP and a host of other projects are aimed at revitalizing the Indigenous language of New Zealand via music.In August, Lorde released her third album, “Solar Power.” Three weeks later, she put out an EP called “Te Ao Marama,” with five songs from the record translated into Maori, the Indigenous language of New Zealand. The second release was no mere afterthought — it was part of longtime conversations in her native country about boosting a language that not long ago experts feared could die out.“Pakeha artists have been lending their support to the language revitalization movement for years, and as someone with global recognition, I knew at some stage I would do the same,” Lorde wrote in an email, referring to non-Maori New Zealanders. “But ‘Te Ao Marama’ didn’t come from a place of duty. I am richer for having sung in te reo” — which means “the language” in Maori — “and also for having made the connections that made doing so possible.”When the musician and producer Dame Hinewehi Mohi, one of the primary engines behind the musical Maori revival, performed the New Zealand national anthem at the 1999 Rugby World Cup in Maori rather than English, she got “such an adverse reaction from a minority of people,” she recalled in a recent interview. Twenty years later, she assembled “Waiata/Anthems” (waiata means “song”), an album of English tracks performed in Maori that includes a translation of Benee’s “Soaked” and Kings’s “Don’t Worry ’Bout It.”“Before this,” Mohi said, “there were only a handful of artists recording in te reo Maori.”The public’s response to the album astounded her: “Waiata/Anthems” debuted at No. 1 on the New Zealand charts in 2019. The work, and interest in Maori music, has not subsided. This year, the public broadcaster TVNZ released a documentary series that followed different artists translating and recording their songs in Maori for a second installment of the project. More than 30 tracks in Maori were released as a playlist, eight of which made it into the local Top 40, and two in the Top 10.Awareness and celebration of Maori music is mirroring a shift in attitudes toward the language across New Zealand. The country’s European settler government suppressed Maori beginning in the mid-1850s, punishing children who spoke their language at school and deliberately dispersing Maori families in white neighborhoods to assimilate them, creating far-reaching whakama, or shame, around it. By 1987, when Maori was finally declared an official language, the vast majority of its remaining speakers were older.In recent years, there has been a resurgence of supporters, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who said in 2018 that her newborn daughter would learn both Maori and English. Newscasters now greet in Maori; weather reporters call places by their original, Maori names; supermarket signs tell you where the “chicken/heihei” is. Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, an endeavor that aims to publish 100 books in Maori over the next 25 years, is already far ahead of schedule. Mohi’s idea to bring attention to the language via contemporary music was pragmatic: More than half of the Maori population, which make up nearly 17 percent of the total population, is under 30 years old.But who sings in Maori, and how, has also become a flash point. Lorde was criticized in the wake of her EP’s release by those who argued that white speakers are privileged to do so without having to address the trauma of the Maori people; or said that the EP is a painful reminder of how many Maori haven’t had access to their own language. Other observers called her project “a pop culture landmark we should welcome” and “a very powerful international statement about the currency of the language.” Mohi had approached Lorde about working on the original “Waiata/Anthems” because “you want the biggest audience” exposed to Maori, she said.Singing has always been a large part of Maori culture: In formal meetings, it is compulsory to sing after your speech (these “songs” are more like chants). Songs are used to pass on information, including “telling the grandchild what deaths he needs to avenge, what things he needs to remember, the important features of tribe history,” said Sir Timoti Karetu, an expert on Maori language and culture.Maori people sing other songs — love songs, naughty songs, insulting songs — in everyday life, too. “We sing no matter where we are,” Karetu said. Music helped keep the language alive even when the government’s restrictions were in place. Maori people adapted with the times, writing new tunes highly influenced by Pakeha melodies. “We’ve borrowed the tune and done our own thing,” Karetu said.“It’s very easy to do a literal translation, but that’s meaningless to both cultures — it’s just words,” said Sir Timoti Karetu, an expert on Maori language and culture.Cameron James McLaren for The New York TimesBic Runga, a Maori singer involved in both “Waiata/Anthems” releases, said, “There’s a really big shift in awareness here.” She was in the process of reconnecting with her roots when Mohi approached her for the first album, which included her song “Sway,” made famous by the movie “American Pie.” Though Runga had only absorbed little bits of Maori in elementary school, as a result of doing “Waiata/Anthems,” she’s been connected to more fluent speakers and is trying to incorporate Maori into her emails, like opening with “tena koe” instead of “hi.”Runga has tried writing a song in Maori, although it’s not as simple as translating the text directly. “It was kind of spooky — it was about talking to death,” she said. When the lyrics were getting checked, she found out she’d been using the literal translation for death instead of the personified word — Maori is a very metaphorical language associated with a worldview that is more connected with nature, and doesn’t necessarily follow Western assumptions.“It’s very easy to do a literal translation, but that’s meaningless to both cultures — it’s just words,” Karetu said.“There’s a really big shift in awareness here,” the musician Bic Runga said.Dave Simpson/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAn example of its nuance can be found in Lorde’s “Hine-i-te-Awatea,” or “Oceanic Feeling.” Hana Mereraiha, who translated it, said she was granted creative license for the three songs she worked on; the album “Solar Power,” with its dedication to the sun and everything living under it, was quite Maori in spirit already.“There’s a really beautiful concept in te ao Maori, that of kaitiakitanga,” Lorde wrote. “It refers to an understanding that people and environment are interconnected and dependent on each other’s care to thrive.”The final line of the third verse of “Hine-i-te-Awatea” refers to the Maori idioms “paki o Hewa” and “paki o Ruhi,” which both mean fine weather, referencing the deities Hewa and Ruhi — “paki o Ruhi” is associated specifically with summer. Its last part, “te ao marama,” is a translation of the equivalent line in the English version, “I can make anything real,” as it refers to when the god Tane separated his father (Rangi-nui, the sky) from his mother (Papatuanuku, the earth), and brought light into the world.Mereraiha “broadened the universe of the song so that all the spiritual presences I could always feel but could never articulate were there,” Lorde wrote. “The Maori version feels like the original to me now.”Hana Mereraiha is a translator who worked on Lorde’s EP project, among others.Cameron James McLaren for The New York TimesSince Mereraiha started translating, she has worked with around 12 artists, and is writing and singing as well. “Dame Hinewehi has opened up many pathways into the music industry,” she said.The Maori singer Marlon Williams, who made a brief appearance in “A Star is Born” in 2018, decided to write his next album completely in Maori. Like Runga, Williams didn’t really speak Maori until a few years ago — he attended a kohanga reo, a total immersion preschool, and took some Maori at high school, but none of it stuck.For Williams, learning the language fresh has helped his songwriting. “I’m not aware of the errors I’m making,” he said, so he’s “not weighed down by them.” He relies on a collaborator, Kommi Tamati-Elliffe, a hip-hop artist and Maori lecturer at the University of Canterbury, to check over his work and find solutions when phrases aren’t working.“We’re on another awkward step on the globalization ladder where everything is mixing and melding,” Williams said. But he believes listeners don’t need to understand the lyrics for the songs to become big hits. “I don’t know any more Spanish after listening to ‘Despacito,’” Williams said. “Things that exist in the pop realm sometimes are their own thing.”Language revitalization is “a never-ending battle,” Karetu said. “All of us who have been colonized by somebody else are struggling for our languages to survive.” But, when it comes to songs, he’s more positive. “Waiata will never die. I think waiata will go on forever and ever.” More

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      Lorde Steals Her Sunshine Back

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      Lorde’s new album “Solar Power” marks a pivot for the New Zealand singer-songwriter, away from the insular and intimate relationship tension captured on her last album, “Melodrama” from 2017, into a brighter palette and songs about embracing wellness and posi vibes.This is something that can happen when you grow up in public — a rejection of the fixed gaze that stardom imposes on you. For Lorde, it’s meant a long retreat from the spotlight, and an insistence on making music that hews to no fixed idea about what a “Lorde sound” should be.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about this sunny phase of Lorde’s career, the ways pop stardom can dull a creative person’s edges and what it means to choose to move away from the expectations of superstardom.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterLindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times and others More

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      Lorde Opts Out on the Provocatively Subdued ‘Solar Power’

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      The singer and songwriter trades the sonic dynamism and moodiness of her 2017 album “Melodrama” for sun-soaked self-assurance on an LP that doesn’t always come into focus.Eight years ago, the New Zealand pop singer-songwriter Lorde’s breakout hit “Royals” arrived with a seismic rumble and an observational critique: “Every song’s like ‘gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom, blood stains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room.’”For all its eye-rolling, refusenik attitude, the implicit joke was that “Royals” was in some sense one of those everysongs, too, lip-syncing along to the same sentiment it was rejecting. After all, that hook was one of the catchiest parts of the song, underlined by Lorde’s signature, soon-to-be-ubiquitous multitracked self-harmonies.Eventual accusations that “Royals” was moralizing about hip-hop culture did not necessarily take into account the fact that it was paying studied homage to it — woven into the sonic DNA of the song’s low-blood-pressure, 808-heartbeat. Lorde’s music is often idiosyncratically personal, but it also speaks from the perspective of the royal “We.” Something that has always kept her point of view from feeling didactic — even if it has occasionally made her intentions feel a little muddled — is the way her music blurs the line between social commentary and self-own.In a similar spirit, on the third track of her provocatively subdued third album, “Solar Power,” Lorde declares in her looping, vocal cursive, “Don’t want that California love” — this on a song that explicitly references Laurel Canyon folk, the most well-known Joan Didion essay and Quentin Tarantino’s Los Angeles pastiche “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” Once again, it takes one to know one. “It’s all just a dream,” Lorde gently chides the Coachella-era flower children, on a weightless, twinkling song that sounds suspiciously like one.Earlier this summer, when Lorde first released the album’s breezy title track, some listeners who had expected a sound similar to her bruising, resilient 2017 triumph, “Melodrama,” were left wondering if the 24-year-old known in civilian life as Ella Yelich-O’Connor was kidding. Was this a sendup of influencer culture or a music video explicitly designed as a carousel of Instagram screenshots? How could someone who’d previously made an emotionally operatic 11-song concept album about running into an ex at a party suddenly toss off a line as carefree as “Forget all of the tears that you’ve cried, it’s over”?“Solar Power” and its subsequent singles, “Stoned at the Nail Salon” and “Mood Ring,” make more sense within the context of the album, thanks largely to the vivid scene-setting opener, “The Path.” Atop a murky guitar, Lorde presents a series of impressionistic snapshots of her post-“Royals” life: Attending the 2016 Met Gala in a cast, swiping a fork as a souvenir for her mother, “supermodels all dancing ’round a pharaoh’s tomb.” Elsewhere, she recalls the life-changing moment “when Carole called my name” (as in, Carole King announcing “Royals” as song of the year at the 2014 Grammys) and admits, “I’ve got hundreds of gowns, I’ve got paintings in frames and a throat that fills with panic every festival day.”With the plunging swoop of chorus on “The Path,” though, Lorde suddenly rejects the notion that anyone present for such surreal, celebrity-studded scenes — including herself — can tell the average person how to live their life. “If you’re looking for a savior, well, that’s not me,” she sings, her lush stacked vocals this time highlighting the line’s unapologetic defiance.Lorde, though, is hardly alone in this sentiment. It is somewhat remarkable to consider how many pop albums of the past year have taken up the sometimes-debilitating stress associated with modern-day fame as their main theme: Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever,” Clairo’s “Sling,” and Lana Del Rey’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” all chronicle their creators’ burnout and consider, to varying degrees, packing it in and quitting the pop game forever. (A similar conversation has been happening with young women in the sports world, too.) It is perhaps not such a coincidence that three of these four albums, including “Solar Power,” were produced mostly by the seemingly busiest producer in the music industry, the girl-pop-Zelig Jack Antonoff.What keeps much of “Solar Power” from really taking root, though, is that most of these songs are written from the perspective of an enviably serene person snugly on the other side of that struggle. “Dancing with my girls, only having two drinks, then leaving/It’s a funny thing, thought you’d never gain self control,” Lorde sings blithely on one of the album’s more cloying numbers, “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All).” At times, “Stoned” and the otherwise incisive “The Man With the Axe” depict personal growth and maturity as a universal footbridge that one decisively crosses once and for all around age 21, rather than a messy, ongoing, lifelong process of stops and false starts. “I thought I was a genius,” she reflects on “Axe,” “but now I’m 22.” At least wait until Saturn returns, Lorde!Make no mistake, amber is the color of her energy, at least at the moment. The mood board of her career peak, “Melodrama,” though, contained a whole kaleidoscope of color, and it’s that wonderful album’s sense of contrast and sonic dynamism that’s missing the most here. Every song on “Solar Power” pulls from a similar and finely curated aesthetic — early 2000s “CW”-theme-song pop; sun-drenched ’70s folk; just a pinch of Kabbalah-era Madonna — and rarely draws outside those lines, let alone picks up differently hued crayons. Name-dropped proper nouns too often feel like a pile of signifiers one step away from being shaped into sharper observations. Even the songs that most directly skewer modern-day wellness culture (the spiritual satire “Mood Ring,” the devilishly emasculating “Dominoes”) would not exactly be offensive to the ears if they were played during a yoga class’s savasana.Perhaps the most stirring moments on the album come toward the very end, at the conclusion of the loose, winding six-minute closer, “Oceanic Feeling.” It’s partially a showcase of the striking, near-photographic clarity Lorde can sometimes achieve with her lyrics (“I see your silver chain levitate when you’re kickflipping”) and a kind of guided visualization of an eventual life after pop stardom. The girl who just eight years ago was asking, however playfully, to be your ruler is now singing with a stirring serenity, “I’ll know when it’s time to take off my robes and step into the choir.”Even as it has billowed to consider such lofty elements as water, sun and air, Lorde’s close-miked music has retained such a careful intimacy that, at times, you can still actually hear her smiling. But like a beaming Instagram photo selectively chosen from a vast camera roll of outtakes, “Solar Power” stops just short of offering a full, varied range of expressions.Lorde“Solar Power”(Republic) More

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      What’s on TV This Week: Lorde on Late Night and ‘American Horror Story’

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      The musician Lorde has a residency on CBS’s “Late Late Show With James Corden.” And a new season of “American Horror Story” begins on FX.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Aug. 23-29. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE LATE LATE SHOW WITH JAMES CORDEN 12:37 a.m. (Tuesday morning) on CBS. The musician Lorde released a new album, “Solar Power,” Aug. 20. This week, she’ll have a four-night residency on James Corden’s late-night show. Monday night’s broadcast will pair her with the actor Jason Momoa, who will appear as a guest to promote a new Netflix action movie, “Sweet Girl,” which also came out last week.THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (2013) 5 p.m. on AMC. In November, Disney is slated to debut Peter Jackson’s latest project, “The Beatles: Get Back,” a documentary about the making of the Beatles’s final album. The project was originally intended to be a feature-length movie that would have been released in theaters, but it was recently announced that the film would be expanded into a three-part TV series. That Jackson decided to go long is no surprise: The combined running time of his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of the early 2000s was over 9 hours, and his follow-up trilogy, “The Hobbit,” clocked in at just under 8 hours. If you’re looking to pass some (or more than some) time on Monday, AMC is showing the whole “Hobbit” trilogy in order, beginning with “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012) at 1 p.m. and ending with “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” (2014) at 8:45 p.m. All three movies follow Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel of the same name, whose adventures here reach a level of maximalism that rivals that of a child’s imagination.TuesdayFIRST REFORMED (2018) 4:15 p.m. on Showtime 2. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader is set to return to theaters next month with his newest movie, “The Card Counter,” a drama about a troubled gambler. Schrader was last in theaters in 2018, when he released “First Reformed,” a drama about a troubled Protestant minister. That pastor is Rev. Ernst Toller, played by Ethan Hawke, who oversees a small church in upstate New York. His story intersects with that of a young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried). The movie touches on issues of faith, money and climate disaster, and is, A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, “an epiphany.”WednesdayAMERICAN HORROR STORY: DOUBLE FEATURE 10 p.m. on FX. This long running horror anthology series from the “Glee” creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk had a year off in 2020 because of the pandemic, but it will make up for that this year with its new season, “Double Feature,” which will tell two parallel stories. One is about a family that goes on a winter retreat by the sea; the other shows horrific events in drier environs.CMT GIANTS: CHARLEY PRIDE 9 p.m. on CMT. The singer Charley Pride, who broke ground as country music’s first Black superstar, died from complications of Covid-19 in December. He was 86. This 90-minute special will honor Pride’s career and the impact that he had on country music. It brings together performances from other country stars — including Darius Rucker and Reba McEntire — and archival interviews with Pride himself.ThursdayFRENCH EXIT (2020) 9 p.m. on Starz. Michelle Pfeiffer plays an over-the-top New York socialite who was recently widowed in this comedy-drama, adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2018 novel of the same name. After learning that her once-considerable bank account has dried up, Pfeiffer’s character, Frances, moves to Paris to live at a friend’s cramped apartment with her son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges). The movie is “hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. But, she added, “Pfeiffer is flat-out fabulous here, at once chilly and poignant.”FridayAnthony Mackie, center left, and Bryan Cranston, center right, in “All the Way.”Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/HBOALL THE WAY (2016) 4:35 p.m. on HBO. Bryan Cranston won a Tony Award for his performance as President Lyndon B. Johnson in the stage version of the Robert Schenkkan play “All the Way.” This television adaptation, which also includes performances from Bradley Whitford, Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella, hews to the play; it, too, follows Johnson’s first year in office. In his review for The Times, Neil Genzlinger wrote that, while “nothing beats witnessing this kind of larger-than-life portrayal onstage,” Cranston’s performance in the TV adaptation is still powerful. “In his hands,” Genzlinger wrote, “this accidental president comes across as an amazing bundle of contradictions, someone who seems at once too vulgar for the job and just right for it.”SaturdayTHE DIRTY DOZEN (1967) 5:15 p.m. on TCM. When this Robert Aldrich war movie debuted in 1967, The Times’s Bosley Crowther called it a “studied indulgence of sadism that is morbid and disgusting beyond words.” Nevertheless — or, perhaps, accordingly — it was a hit at the box office. The story, based on the novel of the same name by E.M. Nathanson, follows a group of criminals who are given an extraordinarily dangerous mission during World War II, and are promised pardons if they succeed. The ensemble cast includes Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Donald Sutherland.SundayThe World Trade Center, as seen in “9/11: One Day in America.”Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress9/11: ONE DAY IN AMERICA 9 P.M. on National Geographic. Leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this six-part, seven-hour documentary series revisits the events of that day and their immediate aftermath. It includes interviews with firefighters, emergency medical workers and others who experienced the wreckage firsthand. More

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      Lorde cumplió con su tarea. Ahora vive

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      Fue un fenómeno adolescente por el gran éxito de ‘Royals’ y un álbum que fue aclamado por la crítica. Pero ahora, con 24 años, la música neozelandesa no persigue la fama masiva. Sigue la ruta del sol.Lorde grabó ‘Solar Power’, su tercer álbum, después de tomarse una pausa en la que simplemente se enfocó en vivir.Justin J Wee para The New York TimesPuede ser tentador, tras pasar mucho tiempo con Lorde, preguntarse qué le pasa.Es decir, ¿dónde esconde exactamente los puntos negativos, los defectos, las partes poco favorecedoras de cualquier personalidad que se asoman de manera incómoda, especialmente después de vivir una trayectoria tan extraña como la suya? Nadie que haya sido famosa y agasajada desde los 16 años, podría estar tan bien adaptada. ¿O sí?Ni siquiera se trata de que la cantante y compositora cuyo nombre de pila es Ella Yelich-O’Connor, ahora de 24 años, se presente como alguien especialmente perfecta, segura de sí misma o inmune a las críticas. No es que no tenga dudas, inseguridades, ataques de vanidad, impaciencia o que vea cosas en su celular sin pensar demasiado.Pero Lorde —la humana y la artista— suele ir un paso adelante, de forma intuitiva y emocional, tras haber pensado en su realidad desde la mayoría de los ángulos: cómo le pareció algo, cómo podría expresarlo, cómo será recibido y cómo podría procesar la forma en que fue interpretada. Ese es un conjunto de habilidades que muchas personas que llegan al estrellato como ella —una adolescente brillante de un pueblo pequeño con un éxito arrollador— pueden fingir bastante bien. Pero pocos lo hacen de forma tan convincente.“Sé lo suficiente como para saber que las personas en mi posición son símbolos y arquetipos y que el lugar donde nos encontramos con la gente, en el contexto de la cultura y la actualidad, está fuera de nuestro control, así que intento no preocuparme demasiado”, comentó Lorde recientemente, con la consideración y el zen que la caracterizan, antes del lanzamiento de su tercer álbum.“Es una posición muy divertida”, reconoció. “Es absurdo”.Pero es ese sentido de la perspectiva y la autoconciencia lo que ha hecho que Lorde siga adelante en una industria a menudo implacable. De hecho, grabó un álbum entero sobre la búsqueda del equilibrio.Solar Power, que saldrá a la venta el 20 de agosto, es lo que ocurre cuando una estrella del pop burla al sistema, se desvía de sus extrañas exigencias, deja de intentar hacer éxitos y decide susurrar a sus seguidores más devotos cómo lo logró. Para Lorde, el truco fue tener una vida —una vida real— lejos de todo lo demás. Y también tirar su celular al mar. (Un terapeuta tampoco le vino mal).Tras el reinado de “Royals”, su primer sencillo —que estuvo nueve semanas en el puesto número uno y ganó dos premios Grammy— y su debut con el álbum Pure Heroine de 2013, que fue disco de platino en tres oportunidades debido a sus ventas, Lorde tardó cuatro años en lanzar otro material. En comparación, Melodrama, su segundo disco que fue lanzado en 2017, palideció a nivel comercial pero reajustó las expectativas desmesuradas. Además, la estableció como un fenómeno convertido en autora, lo que le valió buenas críticas y otra nominación a los premios Grammy, esta vez en la categoría de álbum del año. Después, reservó cuatro años para dedicarse a ella.En el camino, Lorde se convirtió en un modelo para la industria, una suerte de cantautora diferente y precoz que construye mundos y abrió caminos para una generación que incluye a Halsey, Billie Eilish y Olivia Rodrigo. Pero Lorde no se quedó a mirar lo que pasaba.“Volví a vivir mi vida”, dijo sobre su pausa reciente, identificándose como “una flor de invernadero, una persona delicada y una introvertida empedernida”, agotada tras más de un año de promoción y gira del álbum Melodrama. “Es difícil que la gente lo entienda”.“Últimamente lo que más me preguntan es: ‘¿Qué has estado haciendo?’”, añadió. “Yo digo: ‘Oh, no, no, no: esto es un descanso de mi vida’. Vuelvo y hago estas cosas porque creo en el álbum”.Lorde juró que no volvería a alcanzar las alturas de su gran éxito, “Royals”. “¿Te imaginas?”, dijo. “No me hago ilusiones. Aquello fue un momento excepcional en la vida”.Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesIncluso ahora, con las obligaciones generadas por Solar Power, Lorde programó unas vacaciones de una semana en la playa con amigos, y aprovechó una entrevista programada como una ocasión para realizar varias tareas, caminando para comprar una bolsa llena de buen queso para el viaje.Sin embargo, durante la mayor parte de los últimos cuatro años Lorde ha vivido como Ella entre la vegetación y el esplendor de los muelles donde creció, en Auckland, Nueva Zelanda, y sus alrededores, trabajando para descubrir sus límites.Una amiga de las amigas que conoció en ese lugar, Francesca Hopkins, dijo: “Todo ese asunto de Lorde no se menciona ni se ha comentado realmente. Probablemente pueda contar con una mano la cantidad de veces que se ha pronunciado la palabra ‘Lorde’”.La cantante también comenzó el proceso de abordar su adicción a internet, inspirada en libros como Pilgrim at Tinker Creek de Annie Dillard y Cómo no hacer nada de Jenny Odell.“Veía que mi tiempo de pantalla llegaba como a 11 horas y sabía que era solo por mirar el Daily Mail”, dijo Lorde. “Recuerdo que me senté en la cama y me di cuenta de que podía llegar al final de mi vida y haber hecho esto todos los días. Y depende de mí elegir, ahora mismo. Así que simplemente elegí”.Al final hizo falta más que eso: el teléfono de Lorde, configurado en escala de grises, ahora no tiene navegador de Internet; no puede entrar en sus aplicaciones de redes sociales (otros manejan las contraseñas); y un amigo codificador incluso hizo que YouTube fuera inaccesible en su computadora portátil. “No he hecho un disco de Jack Antonoff”, dijo la cantante. “He hecho un disco de Lorde y él me ha ayudado a hacerlo y me ha delegado muchas tareas de producción y los arreglos”.Justin J Wee for para New York TimesEn cambio cocinó, horneó, paseó al perro, nadó, cultivó el jardín —en otras palabras, se relajó— mientras esperaba a ver “si ocurría algo más sobre lo que valiera la pena escribir”. Pero resultó que ya lo había hecho, especialmente cuando se entretejía con su existencia actual.En “The Path”, la deslumbrante canción con que inicia Solar Power y que escribió como una especie de declaración de tesis para el álbum, Lorde se describe como “criada en la hierba alta”, pero también como una “adolescente millonaria que tiene pesadillas en las que aparecen las luces de las cámaras”. “Si buscas una salvadora, esa no soy yo”, advierte. No obstante ofrece una alternativa embriagadora: el sol.“Estoy consciente de cómo me mira la gente”, dice Lorde. “Puedo sentir la enorme cantidad de amor y devoción que las personas sienten por mí —y por la gente que está en mi posición— y enseguida quise decir: ‘Yo no soy la que merece tu devoción. Básicamente, soy como tú’”.Y agregó: “Mis chicos —mi comunidad— esperan trascendencia espiritual de mi parte, de estas obras. ‘¡Necesito que Lorde vuelva y me diga cómo sentirme, que me diga cómo procesar este periodo de mi vida!’. Y yo, lo que pienso es: ‘No sé si puedo ayudarte con eso. Pero lo que sí sé es que, si todos miramos hacia arriba, ¡eso nos ayudará mucho!’”.Jugando con el papel de estrella del pop como mesías, abrazó el personaje de líder de la secta en la canción, haciendo proselitismo sobre el mundo natural.Pero Lorde también sabe que estos consejos proceden de un lugar privilegiado, ya que coinciden con algunos de los principios más obvios de la cultura moderna del bienestar (que también critica en el álbum): salir a la calle. Pasar tiempo con la familia. Apagar el teléfono. Salir con los amigos.Lo que evita que Solar Power resulte didáctico o excesivamente simplificado son las letras en las que satiriza sus propias experiencias, basándose en detalles chismosos y rebajando las ideas demasiado elevadas con humor, como cuando interrumpe un frágil tratado sobre el envejecimiento con la frase: “Tal vez solo estoy… drogada en el salón de uñas”.‘Melodrama’ consagró a Lorde como un fenómeno musical que logró la transición para convertirse en cantautora.Chad Batka para The New York TimesLa artista, que antes cantaba con desprecio y desde la distancia sobre la cultura de las celebridades, ahora señala su “baúl lleno de ropa de Simone y Céline” y el tiempo que ha pasado en hoteles, en la Gala del Met, en los Grammy y en aviones. “Tengo cientos de vestidos, tengo cuadros enmarcados”, canta en “The Man With the Axe”. “Y una garganta que se llena de pánico cada día de festival/ que se deshace en honor a la princesa de Noruega”.Sin embargo, alejarse de todo eso, aclara Lorde, simplemente se siente mejor. “Adiós a todas las botellas, a todos los modelos, adiós a los niños que hacen fila para comprar los nuevos productos de Supreme”, añade en “California”, cerrando el ciclo de vuelta a su ethos de Pure Heroine.Lorde sabía que necesitaba un sonido soberbiamente fuera de lo común que se ajustara a su tema y a su sentido de la desconexión. Encontró la estética “twinkly” para Solar Power combinando influencias de los años 60 y 70, como los Mamas and the Papas y los Bee Gees, con artistas de su juventud, a menudo denostados, que representaban lo que ella llamaba “optimismo playero de fin de siglo”: All Saints, S Club 7, Natalie Imbruglia, Nelly Furtado.Alguna vez fiel a la electrónica y alérgica a las guitarras, Lorde solo emplea una caja de ritmos 808 en todo el álbum, en una sección que pretende ser un retroceso autorreferencial. “Definitivamente no hay un exitazo”, declaró sobre sus perspectivas comerciales con una carcajada. “Es lógico que no sea un exitazo, porque ni siquiera sé realmente qué son los exitazos ahora”.Juró no volver a alcanzar las alturas de “Royals”. “Es una causa perdida”, comentó. “¿Te imaginas? No me hago ilusiones. Aquello fue un momento excepcional en la vida”.Sin embargo, ha encontrado un aliado en la experimentación y el agnosticismo sobre Billboard en el productor y compositor Jack Antonoff, con quien también escribió y produjo Melodrama.“Grabas tu primer álbum con una alegría increíble porque no existe nada”, explicó Antonoff. Pero recordó la inminente presión que precedió a la segunda grabación de Lorde, por lo que tuvieron que aislarse para evitar el bullicio, lo que dio lugar a la intimidad que se percibe en Melodrama.Solar Power, dijo, surgió de una renovada sensación de libertad. “El tercer álbum es un gran lugar para hacerlo, para despertar y decir: ‘Realmente amo este trabajo y tengo mucha suerte de estar aquí’. Simplemente vuelves a conectarte con lo que haces. Hubo mucho de eso”.Lorde estuvo de acuerdo. “Sentí que podía relajarme y presumir un poco”, concluyó.“Últimamente la pregunta que más me hacen es: ‘¿Qué has estado haciendo?’”, dijo Lorde. “Yo digo: ‘Oh, no, no, no: esto es un descanso de mi vida’. Vuelvo y hago estas cosas porque creo en el álbum”.Justin J Wee para The New York TimesSin embargo, es en el contexto de Antonoff donde Lorde expresó lo más parecido a la angustia que pudo experimentar. En concreto, se mostró en desacuerdo con un creciente contingente de fans y críticos que meten en el mismo saco el extenso trabajo del productor con otras artistas pop femeninas —Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey y Clairo, entre ellas—, reduciendo a Lorde a una yegua más en lo que ella denomina, con algo de filo y más humor, “el establo de Jack”.“No he hecho un disco de Jack Antonoff”, dijo la cantante. “He hecho un disco de Lorde y él me ha ayudado a hacerlo y me ha delegado muchas tareas de producción y los arreglos. Jack estaría de acuerdo con esto. Darle esa cantidad de crédito es francamente insultante”. Ella calificó la narración —que también ha incluido especulaciones sobre la vida romántica y sexual de la pareja— de “retro” y “sexista”.“Sé que hay ciertas señas de identidad de lo que hace Jack y algunas de esas cosas me encantan y otras no me gustan. Y las saco a golpes del trabajo que hacemos juntos”, añadió. “Lo digo con mucho amor y cariño, pero me siento como si estuviéramos arreglando una casa juntos y él dijera: ‘¡Mira esta servilleta que he diseñado en forma de dos cisnes! ¡Mira este conjunto de cestas tejidas!’. Y yo le digo: ‘Genial, una por habitación’”.En un ensayo reciente para una actuación en un programa de televisión nocturno, Lorde estaba claramente al mando y atenta a los detalles. Al llegar, Antonoff advirtió que su forma de tocar la guitarra sería “bastante floja”.“¿Qué tan floja?”, respondió Lorde. Más tarde, hizo una pausa al cantar para escuchar con más atención el arreglo. “Lo único que haría sería clavarte un poco más en la grabación”, ofreció Lorde, con la franqueza que otorga una sociedad experimentada.“¡Pero bonito!”, añadió.“Nadie que esté en un trabajo como este tiene una relación como la que tengo con Jack”, dijo Lorde después. “Él es como un compañero para mí. Tenemos una relación. No es una relación romántica, pero llevamos siete años en ella, y es algo realmente único, así que no recrimino que la gente no pueda entenderlo”.Trató de mantener la misma mentalidad para el lanzamiento de Solar Power, dijo, volviendo a la idea de que estaba “muy, muy reconciliada y a gusto con cosas como la percepción del público. Simplemente, hoy en día no me perturba”.“Casi valoro que la gente no lo entienda al principio”, dijo sobre el álbum. “Me deprime un poco cuando sale un álbum y lo reviso muy rápido y miro Genius y leo todas las letras en tres minutos y me doy cuenta de que sé exactamente lo que es y no va a crecer”.“Creo que todavía estoy dando algo que es realmente digerible”, añadió Lorde con una sonrisa de satisfacción, “pero me gusta confundir. Me gusta ser eso para la gente”.Joe Coscarelli es reportero cultural especializado en música pop. Su trabajo busca revelar las maneras en las que se descubren, crean y comercializan las canciones de éxito y los nuevos artistas. Antes trabajó en la revista New York y The Village Voice. @joecoscarelli More

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      Lorde’s Work Here Is Done. Now, She Vibes.

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      She was a teen phenom who followed her hit “Royals” with a critically acclaimed album. But now 24, the New Zealand musician isn’t chasing hits. She’s following the sun.Lorde’s third album, “Solar Power,” was made after a break during which the singer and songwriter simply lived.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesIt can be tempting, upon spending any extended amount of time around the musician Lorde, to wonder what is wrong with her.That is, where exactly does she hide the bad parts, the off-notes, the unflattering bits of any personality that poke out awkwardly, especially after experiencing a trajectory as strange as hers? No one, famous and feted at 16, could possibly be so well-adjusted. Right?It’s not even that the singer and songwriter born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, now 24, presents as especially perfect, or self-assured or immune to criticism. It’s not that she doesn’t suffer from second-guessing, insecurities, bouts of vanity, impatience or mindless cellphone scrolling.But Lorde — the human and the artist — can usually be found one step ahead, intuitively and emotionally, having thought through her reality from most angles: how something felt to her, how she might express that, how it will be received and how she might process how she was interpreted. This is a skill set that many people who become known like she did — as a gifted small-town teenager with an out-of-the-gate smash success — can feign pretty well. But few do it as convincingly.“I know enough to know that people in my position are symbols and archetypes and where we meet people, in the context of culture and current events, is sort of outside of our control, so I try not to fret too much,” Lorde said recently, with characteristic consideration and Zen, ahead of the release of her third album.“It’s a very funny position to be in,” she acknowledged. “It’s absurd.”But it’s this sense of perspective and self-awareness that has kept Lorde going in an often unforgiving industry. In fact, she made an entire album about finding balance.“Solar Power,” out Aug. 20, is what happens when a pop star outwits the system, swerves around its strange demands, stops trying to make hits and decides to whisper to her most devoted followers how she did it. For Lorde, the trick was having a life — a real life — far away from all of this. And also throwing her phone into the ocean. (A therapist didn’t hurt either.)After the reign of “Royals,” her first single — which spent nine weeks at No. 1 and won two Grammys — and her three-times platinum 2013 debut “Pure Heroine,” Lorde took four years to release a follow-up. Her second album, “Melodrama,” in 2017, paled in comparison commercially, but it realigned out-of-whack expectations, establishing the singer as a phenom-turned-auteur, earning her rave reviews and another Grammy nomination, this time for album of the year. Then she hoarded four more years for herself.Along the way, Lorde became an industry blueprint for a sort of world-building, precocious wallflower singer-songwriter, helping to usher in a generation including Halsey, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. But Lorde hasn’t really stuck around to see it.“I went back to living my life,” she said of her recent hiatus, identifying as “a hothouse flower, a delicate person and a massive introvert,” drained after a year-plus of promotion and touring for “Melodrama.” “It’s hard for people to understand that.”“The question I’ve gotten a lot recently is, ‘What have you been doing?’” she added. “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.”Lorde vowed to never again reach for the heights of her breakout hit, “Royals.” “Can you imagine?” she said. “I’m under no illusion. That was a moonshot.”Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesEven now, with the obligations piling up ahead of “Solar Power,” Lorde scheduled a weeklong beach vacation with friends, and used a scheduled interview as an occasion to multitask, walking to buy a tote bag full of nice cheese for the trip.Most of the last four years, though, Lorde lived as Ella among the greenery and waterfront splendor where she was raised, in and around Auckland, New Zealand, working to figure out her boundaries.A friend from home, Francesca Hopkins, said, “That whole Lorde thing doesn’t and hasn’t really come up. I’ve probably said the word ‘Lorde’ maybe like — I can count it on one hand.”The singer also began the process of addressing her internet addiction, inspired by books like Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” and Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”“I would see my screen-time go to like, 11 hours and I knew it was just looking at the Daily Mail,” Lorde said. “I remember sitting up in bed and realizing I could get to the end of my life and have done this every day. And it’s up to me to choose, right now. So I just sort of chose.”It ultimately took more than that: Lorde’s phone, set to grayscale, now has no internet browser; she is locked out of her social-media apps, with others handling the passwords; and a coder friend even made YouTube inaccessible on her laptop.“I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff record,” the singer said. “I’ve made a Lorde record and he’s helped me make it and very much deferred to me on production and arrangement.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesInstead, she cooked, baked, walked the dog, swam, gardened — chilled, in other words — while she waited to see “if anything else worth writing about happened.” But it turned out that it already had, especially when woven in with her current existence.On “The Path,” the shimmering opening track of “Solar Power” that she wrote early on as a sort of thesis statement for the album, Lorde describes herself as “raised in the tall grass,” but also a “teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash.” “If you’re looking for a savior,” she warns, “well that’s not me.” But she offers a heady alternative: the sun.“I’m aware of the way people look at me,” Lorde said. “I can feel the huge amount of love and devotion that people have for me — and for people in my position — and straightaway, I wanted to be like, ‘I’m not the one that’s worthy of your devotion. I’m essentially like you.’”She continued: “My kids — my community — they’re expecting spiritual transcendence from me, from these works. ‘I need Lorde to come back and tell me how to feel, tell me how to process this period in my life!’ I was like, oh, man, I don’t know if I can help you with that. But what I do know is that if we all look up here, it’s going to help you a lot!”Playing with the role of pop star as messiah, she embraced the character of cult leader in song, proselytizing about the natural world.But Lorde also knows that these fixes come from a place of privilege, overlapping as they do with some of the more obvious tenets of modern wellness culture (which she also skewers on the album): Go outside. Spend time with your family. Turn off your phone. Hang out with your friends.What keeps “Solar Power” from feeling didactic or oversimplified are lyrics in which she satirizes her own experiences, grounding it in gossipy bits of detail and cutting lofty takes with humor, like when she interrupts a fragile treatise on aging with the line, “Maybe I’m … just stoned at the nail salon.”“Melodrama” established Lorde as a phenom-turned-auteur.Chad Batka for The New York TimesThe artist who once sang dismissively and from a distance about celebrity culture now notes her “trunkful of Simone and Céline” and time spent in hotels, at the Met Gala, the Grammys and on jets. “I’ve got hundreds of gowns, I’ve got paintings in frames,” she sings on “The Man With the Axe.” “And a throat that fills with panic every festival day/dutifully falling apart for the princess of Norway.”But opting out, Lorde makes clear, just feels better. “Goodbye to all the bottles, all the models, bye to the kids in the lines for the new Supreme,” she adds on “California,” coming full circle back to her “Pure Heroine” ethos.Lorde knew she needed a proudly out-of-touch sound to match her subject matter and sense of disconnect. She found the “twinkly” aesthetic for “Solar Power” by combining ’60s and ’70s influences like the Mamas and the Papas and Bee Gees with often-maligned artists from her youth that represented what she called “turn-of-the-century beachside optimism”: All Saints, S Club 7, Natalie Imbruglia, Nelly Furtado.Once faithful to electronics and allergic to guitars, Lorde employs only a single 808 drum machine on the entirety of the album, in a section meant as a self-referential throwback. “There’s definitely not a smash,” she declared of her commercial prospects with a cackle. “It makes sense that there wouldn’t be a smash, because I don’t even know really what the smashes are now.”She vowed to never again reach for the heights of “Royals.” “What a lost cause,” she said. “Can you imagine? I’m under no illusion. That was a moonshot.”But she’s found an ally in experimentation and Billboard-agnosticism in the producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff, with whom she also wrote and produced “Melodrama.”“You make your first album with an amazing amount of joy because nothing exists,” Antonoff said. But he recalled the looming pressure that preceded the second Lorde LP, which resulted in the pair tucking themselves away to avoid the glare and resulted in the intimacy of “Melodrama.”“Solar Power,” he said, came from a renewed sense of freedom. “The third album is a great place to do it — to wake up and be like, ‘I really love this work and I’m so lucky to be here.’ You just sort of reconnect with it. There was a lot of that.”Lorde agreed. “I felt like I could just chill out and flex a little bit,” she said.“The question I’ve gotten a lot recently is, ‘What have you been doing?’” Lorde said. “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.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesYet it’s in the context of Antonoff that Lorde expressed the closest thing to angst she could muster. Specifically, she took issue with a growing contingent of fans and critics who lump together the producer’s extensive work with other female pop artists — Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Clairo among them — reducing Lorde to yet another mare in what she refers to, with some edge and more humor, as “Jack’s stable.”“I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff record,” the singer said. “I’ve made a Lorde record and he’s helped me make it and very much deferred to me on production and arrangement. Jack would agree with this. To give him that amount of credit is frankly insulting.” She called the narrative — which has also included speculation about the pair’s romantic and sexual life — “retro” and “sexist.”“I know that there are certain hallmarks of what Jack does and some of those things I really love and some of them I don’t like. And I beat them out of the work that we do together,” she added. “I say this with so much love and affection, but I feel like we’re doing up a house together and he’s like, ‘Look at this serviette that I fashioned into the shape of two swans! Look at this set of woven baskets!’ And I’m like, ‘Great — one per room.’”At a recent rehearsal for a late-night television performance, Lorde was clearly in charge and attuned to the details. Upon arriving, Antonoff warned that his guitar playing would be “pretty loose.”“How loose?” Lorde responded. Later, she paused singing to listen more closely to the arrangement. “My only thing would be to nail you a little bit more to the recording,” Lorde offered, with the bluntness afforded by a seasoned partnership.“Pretty, though!” she added.“No one who’s in a job that isn’t my job has a relationship like the one I have with Jack,” Lorde said later. “He’s like a partner to me. We’re in a relationship. It’s not a romantic relationship, but we’ve been in it for seven years, and it’s a really unique thing, so I don’t begrudge people maybe not being able to understand it.”She was trying to keep the same mindset for the release of “Solar Power,” she said, returning to the idea that she was “very, very reconciled and at ease with things like public perception. It’s just not rocking my boat these days.”“I would almost value people not understanding it at first,” she said of the album. “It sort of depresses me when an album comes out and I click through it really fast and I look at the Genius and read all the lyrics in three minutes and I realize I know exactly what it is and it isn’t going to grow.”“I think I’m still giving something that’s really digestible,” Lorde added with a smirk, “but it’s my pleasure to confound. I’m down to be that for people.” More