Lorde is back with new single What was that!

Four years after Solar Power, Lorde released the track What Was That? on April 24, marking the beginning of a new artistic chapter. It’s not an explosive comeback, but a light, almost timid appearance—a fragment that arrives unexpectedly and leaves more questions than answers.

Lorde, What Was That? and the preview of the new album

The song is elusive and intense, and Lorde’s voice moves over a melody that feels more whispered than sung. There’s something magnetic about this track, but it’s hard to decipher: it’s pop, but it doesn’t fully want to be, it’s intimate, but not entirely confessional. It’s as if it lets us glimpse something—but only for a moment.

What’s certain is that What Was That? seems to hint at an album very different from the previous ones—more personal and perhaps more deconstructed. Closer to the emotional minimalism of Pure Heroine than to the baroque romanticism of Melodrama, and certainly far from the acoustic brightness of Solar Power, Lorde is following her own trajectory—once again unpredictable—and that’s precisely where the strength of her return lies.

The release of the track comes at an already intense time for fans eagerly awaiting the new album, set to be released on June 27. Meanwhile, Lorde has also made a surprise live appearance at Coachella 2025, during Charli XCX’s set, joining her on stage for a performance of Girl, So Confusing. The moment was met with enthusiasm and interpreted almost as a declaration of artistic sisterhood: two seemingly distant artists, both committed to breaking the rules of female pop.

With What Was That?, Lorde doesn’t offer certainties—in fact, she seems to want to blur them on purpose. But hasn’t that always been at the heart of her poetics? The charm of her songs never lies in clarity, but in the feeling that something is slipping through our fingers—that something is happening just beneath the surface.

You can listen to What was that by Lorde here: