After releasing “What Was That” as our first taste of her new album, Virgin, Lorde has teed up another track from the album for release.
“Man Of The Year. An offering from really deep inside me. The song I’m proudest of on Virgin. Out next week,” she wrote on Instagram. She paired that caption with a photo of herself wearing jeans, topless except for strips of silver duct tape across her breasts.
According to her recent Rolling Stone cover story, the idea of herself in jeans with duct tape on her breasts is something Lorde envisioned while writing “Man of the Year” and pondering what image would best reflect how she currently feels about her gender identity. After coming up with that image, Lorde said, she recreated it by applying duct tape to herself.
“It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it,” Lorde told Rolling Stone. “But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.”
This is presumably why Lorde described her outfit at the Met Gala, which included a free-floating strip of silver material across her breasts, as “something of an Easter egg.” She noted, “To me it really represents where I’m at gender-wise.”
While Lorde said she still identifies as a cis woman and uses “she/her” pronouns, she described herself to Rolling Stone as “in the middle gender-wise.”
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