Lorde is getting ready to ask some tough questions on her new single “Man of the Year,” which the singer announced is coming out Wednesday (May 28) while dropping a music video teaser on Instagram.
In a clip from the visual posted one day prior to the track’s release, a topless Lorde spins around in a swivel chair and looks down at her bare chest. “Who’s gonna love me like this?” she sings in a snippet of the song. “Who could get me like this, when he flow down through me?”
“M.O.T.Y. Tomorrow late New York time,” the New Zealand native captioned the post. “Written in blood.”
The teaser comes more than a week after Lorde first announced that “Man of the Year” would serve as the second single from June-slated album Virgin, following lead track “What Was That,” which dropped in April. In her recent Rolling Stone cover story, the Grammy winner shared that she wrote “Man of the Year” about her own broadening gender identity, which she says fell into place after she stopped taking oral contraceptives.
“I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she told the publication. “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.”
Just before writing “Man of the Year” — which Lorde has also said is her “favorite” track on Virgin — the star taped her chest down with duct tape in an effort to realize a vision of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment,” she told Rolling Stone. She appears that way on the cover art for “Man of the Year,” wearing nothing but the silver tape and a pair of jeans.
Elsewhere in the interview, Lorde confirmed that she still uses “she” and “her” pronouns, but some days feels more like a man than a woman. “[Chappell Roan] asked me this … She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’” she recalled to the publciation. “I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
See Lorde’s “Man of the Year” teaser below.
