Lorde has never been afraid of catharsis. The singer, literally, strips it down in the new video for her entrancing single “Man of the Year,” offering an unadorned version of herself as revealing as the song’s lyrics. In the striking visual directed by Grant Singer that dropped on Thursday morning (May 29), the 28-year-old vocalist is caught in close up, before the camera pans out to show her sitting on a stool in an empty loft while wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Glidin’ through on my bike, glidin’ through/ Like new from my recent ego death/ Sirens sing overnight, violent, sweet music/ You met me at a really strange time in my life/ Take my knife and I cut the cord,” she sings in a loud whisper over a gently plucked bass guitar. As she describes becoming “someone else,” someone she says is “more like myself,” Lorde strips off her shirt and covers her breasts with electrical tape in the prelude to a thrashing dance routine on a pile of sand spread out in a corner of the loft.
The song co-produced by Lorde and Jim-E Stack — her main collaborator on the upcoming Virgin album due out on June 27 — builds from the alluring, subtle bass accompaniment to a noisy rumble as burbling keyboards and distant drums bubble up alongside cello from Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes.
“Who’s gon’ love me like this?/ Oh-oh, oh, who could give me lightness?/ Way he flow down through me/ Love me like this/ Now I’m broken open/ Let’s hear it for the man of the year,” she sings on the chorus of second song released so far from the LP. “Man of the Year” follows April’s “What Was That,” which debuted at No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. In an Instagram post previewing the second single last week, Lorde wrote that it was an “offering from really deep inside me,” calling it the “song I’m proudest of on Virgin.”
In a recent Rolling Stone cover story, Lorde discussed writing “Man of the Year” after stopping her birth control for the first time since she was a teenager and realizing that her gender felt more fluid than she’d previously realized. Just before writing the song, she said she taped her own chest with duct tape — as in the video — in an effort to reach a vision of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment,” she told RS.
“I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she added. “It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.” The unadorned “Man of the Year” look was previewed at this year’s Met Gala, where Lorde wore a strapless, slate-colored strip of fabric across her chest that she told Vogue was an “Easter egg” that “really represents where I’m at gender-wise. I feel like a man and a woman kind of vibe.”
In addition to the song and video, Lorde also revealed the track list for her anticipated follow-up to 2021’s Solar Power. Among the songs on the album are: “Hammer,” “Shapeshifter,” “Favourite Daughter,” “Current Affairs,” “Clearblue,” “GRWM,” “Broken Glass,” “If She Could See Me Now” and “David.”
Lorce will launch the Ultrasound world tour on September 17 at the Moody Center in Austin, TX on an outing that will feature special guests Blood Orange, The Japanese House, Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Empress Of, co-producer Jim-E Stack and Oklou on select dates.
Watch the “Man of the Year” video and check out the Virgin tracklist reveal below.