Lorde on the “moonshot” of “Royals” and relationship with Jack Antonoff

Forget about industry pundits: Lorde will be the first to tell you that her highly anticipated new album Solar Power, due out August 20, won’t be as successful as her previous records, the Grammy-winning Pure Heroine and the Grammy-nominated Melodrama.

Speaking to The New York Times, she laughs, “There’s definitely not a smash [on the album]. It makes sense that there wouldn’t be a smash, because I don’t even know really what the smashes are now.”

In the past, “Royals” was certainly a smash, but Lorde swore she’d never try to approach that level of success again. “What a lost cause,” she tells the NYT. “Can you imagine? I’m under no illusion. That was a moonshot.”

Like Melodrama, Lorde made Solar Power with producer and Bleachers front man Jack Antonoff, but she resents any attempt to lump her in with the other female artists he’s worked with, like Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent.

“I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff record,” the singer said. “I’ve made a Lorde record and he’s helped me make it and very much deferred to me on production and arrangement. Jack would agree with this. To give him that amount of credit is frankly insulting.”

She calls that narrative “retro” and “sexist,” adding, “No one who’s in a job that isn’t my job has a relationship like the one I have with Jack. He’s like a partner to me. We’re in a relationship.”

“It’s not a romantic relationship, but we’ve been in it for seven years, and it’s a really unique thing,” she adds. “And so I don’t begrudge people maybe not being able to understand it.”

Lorde feels the same way about the album, apparently; of Solar Power, she says, “I would almost value people not understanding it at first.”

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