Alright, I've stayed quiet for long enough, and I can't do it anymore: when is Lorde's next album coming out? I've been polite and I haven't nagged her about it, but none of that has worked, so it's down and dirty time. When can we expect your sophomore effort, girl? After all, it's not like I'm so far out of line by asking, here. Her first album, Pure Heroine, was released all the way back in 2013, and since I've been listening to it for approximately every moment since, I think I'm entitled to ask about when I can clear my calendar for the follow-up.
But even though she's had me on the edge of my seat for almost two years waiting for her next project, it's hard for me to be mad at Lorde, because it's not like she's just sitting around twiddling her thumbs like some other artists we know, whose albums we're waiting for. (Cough cough, Rihanna, cough cough.) In addition to the many performances she's given at music festivals, award shows, and more cool events than you can shake a stick at, she was also the force behind the The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 soundtrack, which was no small feat. She not only produced her own song for the album, "Yellow Flicker Beat," but essentially organized and curated all the other songs that would appear there, including adding her voice to some. And on top of that, she's become best friends with Taylor Swift, a relationship deserving of some serious attention and upkeep.
So she obviously has a lot on her plate, and I'm not holding that against her, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that her new album will be out within a year. Call it optimism on my part, but I have some pretty strong reasoning behind it, that I'm going to share with you.
SO. Lorde has essentially been working on this album since December 2013, according to her, which was the first time she said she was writing new material. But six months later, in June 2014, she still described herself at the very beginning of the process, although she did know that this album was going to be "totally different" from the first. And just about a year after that in May 2015, we heard from our baby genius that she was finally getting into the studio and banging some stuff out after taking some well-deserved time off earlier this year. YESSSSS. So what I think is that Lorde has been writing stuff off-and-on since Pure Heroine came out in 2013, but that she scrapped all that and is now getting down to business with the real thing.
Everything that we know about Lorde suggests that her album-creation process is a short one; her production partner Joel Little said most of what Lorde played him in demos back in 2013 ended up on the final edition of the album in an interview with HitQuarters, and that the whole process took less than a year. I get the sense that Lorde is like Adele in that she wants her albums to be snapshots of her life at the moment she released them, something Adele does by naming each one after the age she was when she wrote them. All the songs on Pure Heroine had a very similar, cohesive feel, of a suburban teenager exploring her surroundings and passing judgement on them, almost like a stream-of-consciousness thing. So for that reason, I bet Lorde just needed to take a second to figure out the new place she was in, and now that she has that (I hope!) figured out, she can bang out a new album in just a couple months.
Again, this is all speculation, but if I had to be so bold as to guess a date... I'm going big and saying late January 2016. It's a few months after the final Hunger Games movie comes out so there's no overlap in case she wants to get involved with that, and it ties in with the beginning of the school year in New Zealand, which at 18, I'm betting Lorde is still keyed into. (I mean, I still get the urge to go back-to-school shopping every September, and I'm 27 years old.) I think she's going to do it all in one rush, and just put it out there in the world for us to like or dislike, without spending a ton of time polishing it or worrying.
So there it is, folks! Late January 2016! Do I hear any other wagers?
Images: giphy (6)
