Lorde got all eyes on Solar Power with both its butt-bearing album art and the breezy title track, which performed well on the charts and has peaked at No. 2 in the US so far. The album is set to drop this week, so Lorde’s new single, “Mood Ring,” is presumably the final pre-album single. She shared the song today, which arrived accompanied by a video, in which Lorde debuts a new blonde look.
Lorde says of the song:
“This is a song I am very excited about, it’s so much fun to me. Obviously when making this album I did a deep-dive into ’60s, Flower Child culture. I wanted to understand the commune life, dropping out from society and trying to start again. That really resonated to me when writing this album. One thing that occurred to me as a major parallel between that time and our time is our wellness culture and our culture of spirituality, pseudo-spirituality, wellness, pseudo-wellness. Things like eating a macro-biotic vegan diet or burning sage, keeping crystals, reading tarot cards or your horoscope. These were all things that they were dabbling in back then, and that me and my girlfriends are dabbling in today. I was like, ‘I think there’s a pop song in here.’ So this is kind of my extremely satirical look at all of those vibes.”
The new track was preceded by “Solar Power” and “Stoned At The Nail Salon,” which have achieved Hot 100 peaks at Nos. 2 and 33, respectively. It remains to be seen if “Mood Ring” will be a hit, but Lorde doesn’t seem to be trying for those these days. That’s not a knock on her: She said so herself. In a recent interview, she said of her new album, “There’s definitely not a smash. It makes sense that there wouldn’t be a smash, because I don’t even know really what the smashes are now.” She also said she’d never try to have a hit like her own “Royals” again, noting, “What a lost cause. Can you imagine? I’m under no illusion. That was a moonshot.”
Watch the “Mood Ring” video above.
Solar Power is out 8/20 via Republic. Pre-order it here.
