Lorde Pushes Back Against “Insulting” Jack Antonoff Narrative

Next week, Lorde will release her new album Solar Power. She recorded the album with Jack Antonoff, who also produced her last album, 2017’s Melodrama. As a whole lot of people have noticed, Antonoff has been doing a whole lot of work with female pop stars lately, collaborating heavily with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Clairo, among others. But in a new interview with The New York Times‘ Joe Coscarelli, Lorde dismisses the “retro,” “sexist” idea that she’s part of “Jack’s stable.”

Talking to the Times, Lorde says:

I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff record. 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…

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. 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.”

The Times piece also quotes some lyrics from as-yet-unreleased Lorde songs and claims that the album’s sonic palette is influenced by ’60s and ’70s acts like the Mamas And The Papas and the Bee Gees, as well as what Lorde calls the “turn-of-the-century beachside optimism” of S Club 7, All Saints, Natalie Imbruglia, and Nelly Furtado. Also, Lorde is making a serious effort to curb her own internet use. Coscarelli writes, “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.”

That mentality seems to be a big part of Solar Power. Lorde tells Coscarelli:

I’m aware of the way people look at me. 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.”…

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!

You can read the full Times piece here. Solar Power is out 8/20 on Republic.