Good Lorde!

Good Lorde! Behind the Blissed-Out Comeback of a Pop Iconoclast

Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, who makes music under the name Lorde, somehow finds a way to push through the gate and descend the steps to my front door with a fig tart in the crook of her elbow and a half-cooked frittata balanced on her forearms. With the surety of an old friend—though we have never met before—she heads straight for the kitchen, lays down the tart, and pops the trembling dish of eggs in the oven. This week marks the beginning of what she calls the “gnarly season,” when the play of making an album gives way to the work of promoting it, and Yelich-O’Connor has arrived in Los Angeles—the city that anointed her on Grammy night in 2014 and that has more or less mystified her ever since—before the frenzy begins, in order to get her COVID vaccine. (Pfizer, for the curious.) A beneficent friend offered her a house in the Palisades, but it’s always hard to cook in an unfamiliar oven. I tell her I won’t judge. She tells me she would.