The musician shared her feelings in a newsletter to her fans.
Lorde isn't afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve. On the year anniversary of the announcement for her highly-anticipated third studio album, Solar Power -- which would be released in August 2021 -- the 25-year-old singer got real with fans in a newsletter about the mixed reviews the record got.
Along with a new music video for "The Path," Lorde shared her feelings, writing, "It’s been a year since I announced the release of Solar Power. I can honestly say it has been the year with the highest highs and lowest lows I think I’ve ever experienced."
"It took people awhile to get the album — I still get emails every day from people who are just coming around to it now! — and that response was really confounding and at times painful to sit with at first,” Lorde continued. “I learnt a ton about myself and how I’m perceived by making and releasing this album, and I feel significantly more connected and alive in my art practice and life than pretty much ever before. Sounds dry but it’s true!!!”
Lorde went on to explain that despite mixed reviews, she is thankful for her fans and that she thinks the album was necessary for her growth and evolution as an artist.
“I was sitting with a friend recently drinking chai at a country house in England, she’s an artist too, and we got on to the topic of the album somehow. She said, ‘It’s clearly one of those works that gets made between peaks, the kind that’s necessary for makers sometimes, no less precious, in fact, there can’t be peaks at all without such works.’ I think this is true of the record,” Lorde shared. “Playing songs from SP live each night in what is undoubtedly my best live show ever is also an incredible feeling — it all makes sense there, both to you and me, in a new and vivid way. And thanks to SP, I’ve been able to work through some big personal stuff that was making it pretty difficult for me to do stuff like travel or play shows without getting completely overwhelmed.”
This isn't the first time Lorde has opened up about the industry and all that comes with being a famous artist. In September 2021, she told Vogue that she isn't cut out for all that comes with being in the public eye.
"I’m great at my job, but I’m not sure I’m the man for the job," she explained at the time. "I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m not built for pop star life. To have a public-facing existence is something I find really intense and is something I’m not good at. That natural charisma is not what I have. I have the brain in the jar."
Lorde is known to take dramatic breaks in music, making Solar Power even more anticipated than most. Her debut album, Pure Heroine, was released in 2013, and it wasn't until another four years that she put out Melodrama. She waited another four years after that to release Solar Power, which the Washington Post reviewed as "something brave and even endearing about the album's willingness to strip away everything familiar, even if it doesn't necessarily work."
In her interview with Vogue, Lorde said, "I have much cynicism, but not about what I know to be the alchemical thing that happens in my work. The work is very powerful to people. My fans are young, and I just know that they look to me for a lot emotionally and spiritually. But it’s an attachment like any other. You want it to be a healthy one. It needs to be right for both of us, and there needs to be that understanding that mummy does go away to the other room, and she will come back!"
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