After speaking out for the first time about her newfound gender identity leading up to new album Virgin, Lorde has announced that the project’s next single will be “Man of the Year,” a track about embracing her own masculinity.
On Monday (May 19), the pop star shared the track’s cover art — a close-up photo of her chest covered by a strip of duct tape, the waistline of her jeans poking out from the bottom of the frame — and wrote on Instagram, “Man Of The Year. An offering from really deep inside me.”
“The song I’m proudest of on Virgin,” Lorde added. “Out next week.”
“Man of the Year” will mark the second track fans are getting from Virgin, which arrives June 27. The New Zealand native previously released “What Was That” in April, debuting at No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In her Rolling Stone cover story from earlier in May, Lorde opened up about writing “Man of the Year” after stopping her birth control and realizing that her gender felt more fluid than she previously realized. Just before penning the track, she taped her own chest with duct tape — just as it appears on the artwork — in an effort to realize a vision of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment,” she told the publication.
“I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she continued. “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.”
Lorde would later tease “Man of the Year” through her 2025 Met Gala look, wearing a strapless, slate strip of fabric adhered to her chest that mirrored what the song’s cover art would look like. “This is my creation,” she told Vogue‘s Emma Chamberlain on the red carpet at the time. “It’s something of an Easter egg … To me it really represents where I’m at gender-wise. I feel like a man and a woman, kind of vibe.”
The rollout cycle for Virgin — which will follow 2021’s Solar Power — has marked the “Royals” singer’s first time opening up about her broadening gender identity. Though she still prefers “she” and “her” pronouns, she explained to Rolling Stone, “[Chappell Roan] was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ … I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’”
Lorde has also shared that overcoming her struggles with an eating disorder — another experience that informed Virgin — allowed her to embrace her true identity. “I had made my body very small, because I thought that that was what you did as a woman and a woman on display,” she recently told Document Journal. “It had the effect of making me [feel] totally ungrounded. I was very weak. I look back now, and I don’t have that same feeling of floating away.”
