What *Was* That?

Lorde’s first single in four years attempts to recreate the magic of ‘Melodrama’, but falls short of proper profundity.

I’d had less eventful Tuesday nights. While Lorde, on the eve of 22 April, was preparing for a pop-up event in New York’s Washington Square Park, I watched on a grainy livestream with confusion. Just before the planned 7pm kickoff (for me in the UK, a little shy of midnight), police shut down the pop-up, citing a lack of permits held by Lorde and her team to host the event. (One article joked that Lorde didn’t realise how famous she truly was, owing to the unprecedented turnout at the pop-up.) After waiting it out a bit, I decided to head to bed. Lorde wouldn’t show up, I concluded.

Show up she did, as I found the next morning, my Twitter feed ablaze with reactions and POVs from the event. In the end, it was less of a pop-up and more of a brief appearance. At about 9:30p.m., Lorde parted the crowd like Moses separating the Red Sea (she did tell us she was like a prettier Jesus!), before premiering in full her new single: ‘What Was That’.

What, indeed. In the forty-eight hours or so following its release, I’ve struggled to make sense of this song. Perhaps, as a longtime Ellaphant, my body and brain have simply gone into shock after four years without new music. It’s true that Lorde’s absence has been keenly felt in my life; though it’s not like we haven’t heard from her in the last four years (more about that later), the new album drought was, if not surprising, just plain boring. It’s why hearing her on Charli xcx’s ‘Girl, so confusing’ remix last year was so culturally captivating; actual song quality aside, hearing new Lorde lyrics felt like witnessing a prophet descending from the mountains to deliver scripture. So, when ‘What Was That’ was teased in a TikTok earlier this month, I – much like, I’m guessing, many of you reading this – was sat. It was officially Lorde Summer, and as such I assumed position on my metaphorical sun lounger. Burn me, Ella!, I screamed as I waited for Mrs. O’Connor’s almighty rays to pierce my skin.

‘What Was That’, I regret to admit, has failed to awaken the Ellaphant within me. That’s not to say I dislike the single; there’s glimmers of great songwriting here, like the ‘Indio haze’ allusion and the MDMA line, the latter of which is a classic Lorde metaphor for drugs-as-love. The trouble is, she rushes for description instead of allusion, overexplaining herself instead of leaving it up to the listener to decide what she means. The vague yet intense ‘Indio haze’, for instance, is justified by ‘a sandstorm that knocks me out’, a GCSE-level metaphor that disappoints instead of electrifies. For an artist known for her poetic lyrics, she veers intriguingly pedestrian here.

The title, and central hook, is especially frustrating. ‘What was that?’, she asks her ex after recounting some of their happiest moments together. But instead of further interrogating what exactly ‘that’ was, she leaves it there. Sure, good lyrics – especially good Lorde lyrics – are all about conjuration without crafting exactly, ultimately leaving it up to the listener. Indeed, Lorde is best when alluding, crafting dreamy vignettes of epiphanic moments without being explicit. Essentially, she’s the master of show-don’t tell; take the ‘we got glow in our mouths’ of ‘White Teeth Teens’, the ‘wild and fluorescent’ motif coursing through the veins of ‘Supercut’, the allegory of ‘fallen fruit’ in the track of the same name. These paint vivid portraits while leaving a huge berth for listener interpretation. On ‘What Was That’, she’s evocative, sure, but only evocative in the same sense of feeling hungry when a friend mentions Five Guys. The song is less poetic and more situational: ‘I didn’t know then, but you’d never be enough’ feels beige in comparison to Melodrama’s ‘When forever was us / Before all of the winds of regret and mistrust’.

The Melodrama comparisons might be unfair – I, along with almost every other critic under the sun, consider it a masterpiece – but even Lorde’s most recent album, the polarising Solar Power, still contained lyrics that incised carefully instead of carved clumsily. ‘The Man With the Axe’, which, I’ll maintain, is one of her most underrated tracks, dazzles with its central tree metaphor and references to panic attacks and pop-star duties, yet its best line is deceptively simple. ‘Our shapes in the dark are the reason I’ve stayed’: it’s not clear what exactly she means, and the joy is in the decoding (though it’s not the only joy). ‘What Was That’ has her asking the question back to us, the listener, without giving us any further guidance. What *was* that? Lorde, we don’t know any better than you do!

For a song that’s so at pains to outline this breakup in exact parameters, it fails to develop its central thesis beyond an idea; where Lorde’s previous portraits of heartbreak splashed an array of sticky colours at the wall then left you to make sense of it, ‘What Was That’ is little more than a sketch, with her explainer for the making of the song evoking more feeling than the song itself. Again, it’s not necessarily a bad track, but from an artist of Lorde’s calibre you can’t help but feel it misses the mark somewhat. A note on lyric site Genius states that ‘What Was That’ finds Lorde as she ‘navigates’ the aftermath of her break-up, but it sounds to me like she’s misplaced her satnav.

Coming back to the last four years: starting in 2021, her album Solar Power was released to polarised reviews that occasionally verged on harsh. Though Lorde would admit soon afterwards that the response was ‘really confounding’ and ‘painful’, the damage was done. In exchange for her lyrical and honest writing – which, and I’ll die on this hill, is some of the best of her career – she’d been met with mostly indifference. A subsequent regrouping last summer, in the form of Internet excitement over the aforementioned ‘Girl, so confusing’ remix, makes me think that Lorde now wants to give the people what they want, and what they want is Melodrama: The Sequel. Yet for all the buzz around ‘pop Lorde’ making her grand return, the track sonically pales in comparison to anything from that album, drawing in blunt pencil where she once painted in luminous watercolour.

The instrumental aims for ‘Ribs’-level catharsis but instead simmers where it should be boiling over. Its synth wurbles feel stifled; its thrashing percussion barely crests above an inside voice. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind if the track were mixed better – there’s another world where the instrumentation is ironed out properly and the track fits in neatly on an avant-pop record such as Robyn’s Honey – but it’s difficult to locate the same rage and bitterness the lyrics speak of in the song’s sonic identity. For a non-English listener, it would be difficult to discern whether Lorde was singing about heartbreak or telling you what she had for breakfast.

In expecting prophecy, we get a text message of a song, and Lorde – with her many lyrical capabilities – is beyond such simplicity. As the listener, perhaps I too bear some responsibility for being disappointed, having set my expectations as high as I did. Then again, expectations are based on track record, and Lorde set that high bar for herself, with three stellar records under her belt that each flex her magnificent pen game. Time will tell if this single is a red herring, and the subsequent album is rich with her typically brilliant writing. But judging from this song alone, it seems that Lorde isn’t ready to tell us what that was either.