New Zealand’s Grammy Award-winning pop crooner, Lorde, has revealed that ‘Solar Power’ was going to be an acid album.
After lighting up 2017 with her Homemade Dynamite, Lorde went on a four-year hiatus from music.
But now, she’s back and is sharing the details of her highly anticipated third studio LP.
When speaking with The New York Times in their YouTube series, Diary of a Song, accompanied by her collaborator Jack Antonoff, Lorde revealed that Solar Power was intended to be an acid album.
However, a bad experience with the substance led to her taking a new creative direction.
“I thought I was going to make this big acid record, but I don’t think it was an acid album,” the songstress explained when speaking with Diary of a Song’s host, Joe Coscarelli.
“I had one bad acid experience in this album, and I was like, ‘Meh, it’s a weed album.’ It’s one of my great weed albums.”
lorde definitely did acid on the beach and wrote solar power and you cannot convince me otherwise
— popeye’s chicken enthusiast (@softtstarr) June 13, 2021
Fans of the singer haven’t been surprised at the latest revelations as the album’s second single, Stoned at the Nail Salon, was kind of a dead giveaway.
Lorde’s interview with The New York Times also gave fans more of an insight into the making of the singer’s first single in four years.
“Solar Power is all New Zealand to me. It sounds like a New Zealand summer,” Lorde explained.
“The sound of a New Zealand summer is the cicadas and those are kind of all over the album … You can hear, like, waves all over the second verse … those are just recordings of waves that I took on my phone.”
Lorde admitting her album was originally going to be an acid trip album until she decided it is a weed album instead is the energy I needed this morning
— Sam in Colour (@sam_incolour) August 6, 2021
Another component of the album that the singer shared was its use of guitars.
Pure Heroine and Melodrama made names for themselves as dark electronic dream-pop records that pulled sounds from other genres. Solar Power promises to be “a guitar album”.
“Jack [Antonoff] came to New Zealand in January of 2020. The studio we were working in belongs to a New Zealand musician called Neil Finn. He left us this cool guitar … and we picked it up and [played it] … [we said] ‘Wow, that sounds like sunshine,’” Lorde explained.
“It became a massive part of the album,” Antonoff said.
Solar Power will be released on August 20, 2021.
