For Lorde fans who wanted more Solar Power, today is a good day, as Lorde dropped a deluxe edition of the album. The expanded release comes with a pair of new songs: the minimal and melodic “Helen Of Troy” and the similar but more rhythmic “Hold No Grudge.”
In a recent email newsletter, Lorde described both of the tracks and their origins, writing:
“These songs were fun explorations on the album journey. They didn’t quite fit into the tracklist for whatever reason but they’re both big tunes. [‘Helen Of Troy’] is just me talking trash to make Jack [Antonoff] laugh, basically. We wrote it super quickly in the tiniest room at Westlake where we did a bunch of [Melodrama] and it was fun the whole time. It’s super off the cuff lyrically, almost ad-libbed, and you can hear me starting to figure out some album themes — ‘So I took a happy face, and it’s coming on like a charm / I don’t wanna get lost, I wanna worship the sun / and if you want, you can come’.
[‘Hold No Grudge’] is a sort of composite portrait of when relationships turn sour, being trapped in the ice but remembering the warmth. Every couple lines, the person I’m singing about changes; one minute it’s a childhood friend, next a crush or a colleague. When this happens to me, I find myself hyper-aware of the space where the closeness used to be, my tongue finding it over and over like the socket of a lost tooth. I came to the conclusion that when it comes to holding grudges, I am just not that b*tch. ‘Acting my age, not my horoscope / guess that’s growing up.’ She’ll drink to that.”
Listen to “Helen Of Troy” above and find “Hold No Grudge” below.
