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When Lorde hit the road in 2022 in support of her album Solar Power, she performed with a newfound sense of freedom. Psychotherapy treatments using MDMA and psilocybin had helped her overcome the stage fright she’d been grappling since she was a kid, allowing her to form new connections to her music and fans.
But at the same time, she reveals in a new Rolling Stone cover story, she was privately struggling with an eating disorder. Lorde starved herself, counted calories, monitored her protein intake, and obsessed over her size. Recalling a press event for Solar Power, Lorde told RS she remembers only feeling thin and worried that she would never be thin enough.
“I felt so hungry and so weak,” she said. “I was on TV [that] morning, and I didn’t eat because I wanted my tummy to be small in the dress. It was just this sucking of a life force or something.”
Lorde said her eating disorder began during the pandemic and continued for several years, though it never reached a point where she began to look visibly unwell to those around her. This included during the Solar Power tour, as she grappled with the dissonance between her newfound joy onstage and her private struggles.
“I don’t know how those two things can be true,” she said. “That I’m having this really amazing, rich experience of playing the shows and meeting these kids, and [yet] I’m also looking at the pictures afterward and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy, thinking it was so unforgivable what I had allowed it to become.”
Lorde’s disordered eating continued after the Solar Power tour and into 2023, when her personal life was rocked further by a break-up with longtime partner Justin Warren. Along with the “really fucking difficult” process of learning how to be alone, Lorde said she also came to realize that her obsession with thinness was controlling her life. The key to addressing her eating disorder was the moment she began to view her compulsions as a self-imposed mission to keep herself small.
“Once I stopped doing that, I had all this energy for making stuff,” Lorde said. “I could see that if I cut that cord, maybe I would get something back that I needed to do my work. And it was totally true. Got it all back, and way more.”
What followed was an experience Lorde called “the ooze” — a process of letting herself take up more space physically, creatively, and emotionally. This not only helped her find a more fluid and expansive gender expression but also fueled the creation of hernew album,Virgin.
The album is imbued with a strong sense of physicality, with Lorde saying, “I think coming more into my body, I came into an understanding of the grotesque nature of it and the glory and all these things. It’s right on the edge of gross. I often really tried to hit this kind of gnarliness or grossness. ‘You tasted my underwear.’ I’ve never heard that in a song, you know? It felt like the right way to tell this whole chapter.”
