It’s been a year, and Lorde is still on that beach. To celebrate the summer solstice — and, accordingly, the one-year anniversary of her Solar Power era — Lorde released a music video for opening track “The Path.” The sixth video off the album is actually the first installment in the overarching narrative, in which Lorde makes it to the island in the first place, eager for her new life of group choreography. Lorde explained all that in a new installment of her newsletter, reflecting from a tour stop in Croatia, where her mother is from. (She played at a castle!)
In that newsletter, she also acknowledged the mixed reception to Solar Power after some fans were disappointed by the psych-pop shift after the four-year wait after Melodrama. “It has been the year with the highest highs and lowest lows I think I’ve ever experienced,” Lorde wrote. She went on to call the response to the album “confounding and at times painful to sit with at first,” and said she didn’t think the album was a “peak” in her career. “I needed to go low, to roll a neon ball through tall grass and see what happened,” she wrote. But, of course, Lorde being Lorde, she spun it all into some great learning experience. “I feel significantly more connected and alive in my art practice and life than pretty much ever before,” she wrote. Great — but can she leave the island yet?
