The pen-pal relationship Lorde manages through her email newsletter gives off a pronounced old-soul air. Her prose scratches at the colorful candor of letters exchanged between 19th-century authors. “It might seem funny or be easy to forget,” a missive from 2023 about heartbreak exclaimed, “but I make records because I need to. The songs are spells; a spell to let go of something, a spell to unlock a door.” The relative lack of updates since then suggested she was privately tussling with molding uncomfortable feelings into thorny pop songs. But this year’s spree of TikTok clips has signaled a coming ripple in the long-distance relationship between her and her fan base. Previewing new single “What Was That” in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park communicates, without explicitly stating, that Lorde intends to make herself available to the audience again.
The lyrics and production of “What Was That” hint at a pivot away from the sun-bleached piff parables of 2021’s Solar Power and back into slicker sounds than last year’s beguiling, swampy cover of Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River.” Working with L.A. producer Jim-E Stack (Kacy Hill, Bon Iver, Charli XCX’s “Girl, so confusing”) and Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan regular Dan Nigro, Lorde tilts the dial back to the “Supercut” frequency of pain expunged on the dance floor. A neat bed of instruments fights to contain the vocalist’s sprawling discontentment, its saturated synths frothing without boiling over as a list of complaints about an ex-lover races out and loops back toward the titular refrain: “What was that?” After parting ways with a record-exec boyfriend in 2023, Lorde is revisiting the darkly universalist dance-pop aesthetics of mid-2010s successes like her 2018 sophomore album Melodrama and the Taylor Swift songs its co-producer Jack Antonoff has worked on. “What Was That” brims with a familiar catharsis; it wonders whether it wasted golden years on a relationship that wouldn’t make it with the aching specificity of an “All Too Well.”
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It’s nice to see Lorde moving on from the stoned and patchy Solar Power, digging deeper with the writing and serving melodies that feel fully baked. But the result seems a bit last decade; those bleating synth-bass and horn notes would not feel out of place on a radio station in love with Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.” The last album, for all its quirks, was a deliberate rejection of the kind of lacerating, personal sad song “What Was That” eagerly embodies. Solar Power’s acoustic shampoo-commercial pop signified a degree of freedom from the usual rueful, bookish synth-pop grind. But tentpoles of that style — “Homemade Dynamite” and “Perfect Places” — fared better than anything her 2021 wellness, weed, and weather initiative had to offer. Circling back to a now-crowded airspace in pop feels almost obligatory, a point you must touch on in a major push. But there’s a chance that, as with the too-slick Max Martin collab and Melodrama lead track “Green Light,” Lorde is trying to throw you off her scent, waiting to swoop in and knock everyone on their asses with a stunning song cycle that gives the single a bit more purpose.
