The doors to the music world swung wide open for Lorde, their hinges loosened by her effortless relatability. “Royals” came out in 2013, the summer when Billboard Hot 100 entries included Justin Timberlake’s “Suit and Tie” and Drake’s “Started from the Bottom.” Pretty high up too, though, were Macklemore and Ryan Lewis with “Thrift Shop,” the themes of which are a little more similar to “Royals.” However, “Thrift Shop” celebrates frugality as a choice. In “Royals,” the rejection of “jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash” is born out of necessity because “it don’t run in our blood.” However, her lyrics also toy with the fantasy of being a ruler, a title that inherently comes with riches. Even as she repeatedly makes the claim that “we don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair”—a take that line aimed at the musical elite—she could see herself as the “queen bee” of the fringe group she finds herself in. For the teenagers like me who had never heard of Cristal or Maybach before, though, she wasn’t on the fringe. We could see ourselves in “Royals.”

“What Was That” proves that Lorde still rules with this relatability. On the lead single from her upcoming album, Virgin (2025), she starts the first verse by singing about common living room furniture and doing the monotonous task of cooking a meal she doesn’t really want. Immediately, the lyrical content and synth-pop took me back to her second album. In Melodrama (2017), Lorde sings of doing “my makeup in somebody else’s car” and getting “flowers for all my rooms.” She excels in describing everyday activities like they’re important and meaningful. But that’s because they are, aren’t they? Right now, there are flowers on my coffee table, all because of instructions on how to care for yourself in the lyrics of an album that came out when I was graduating high school. In a world where the best, biggest parts of everyone’s lives are posted online, Lorde gave the generation growing up with her the permission to celebrate small joys, too.

In the chorus of “What Was That,” though, we can see how far Lorde has come since her debut single. She’s still describing powerful moments, but they’re no longer as accessible. I don’t have any stats for this, but I would guess doing “MDMA in the back garden” is not an experience common to most people, like watching your dog “run through the amber light” (as described in “Big Star” (2021)) might be. In “What Was That,” Lorde goes on to describe an “Indio haze” that is almost certainly a reference to Coachella. The music festival takes place in Indio, California, every year, and while Instagram would have you believe everyone goes to this, in 2024 there were 250,000 total tickets available. That’s about 0.07% of the United States population.

None of this change that Lorde’s lyricism has gone through is wrong. It’s just different, and Lorde knows how much she’s grown and changed, too. “I remember saying then/‘this is the best cigarette of my life’/and I want you just like that,” she sings in the chorus of “What Was That.” This is another moment, a defining one, but the thing about cigarettes is—you can’t ever smoke the same one again. She can buy the same brand, smoke it in the same place, even with the same person, and it won’t be the same cigarette. She can’t have this person, this relationship she sings about, back the way it was either. She could try to replicate it all she wants, but it won’t be the same. Lorde’s power lies not in the relatability of her moments, but instead in the relatability of her feelings. That power is the reason why thousands of fans showed up in Washington Square Park in response to a mass text announcing she’d be there on April 22, 2025. After law enforcement initially shut down the event due to the size of the crowd, Lorde made her appearance later that night and debuted “What Was That.” Even though her lyrics have evolved to match the way her life has evolved, the connection she’s forged with her fans remains intact.

Maybe I’ve never done hard drugs or been to a music festival in California, but I have felt the power of a moment and never wanted it to end. When you’re caught up in that moment, it’s easy to romanticize the people around you. For me, it’s been friendships I thought I couldn’t ever lose. I’ve drunkenly giggled up at the stars with a friend in a way that felt like a coming-of-age movie. I’ve developed code words and coordinated schedules, unable to imagine my life without these people. Sometimes all-consuming friendships like these do last. Sometimes, though, like Lorde, we “wake from a dream” and notice all the baggage that came along with the beauty. I’ve found myself crafting reconciliation texts, just to come to my senses and delete them as quickly as I can. We all want something “just like that”—the way we had it before all the baggage—don’t we?

Zillennial therapy-goers and anyone trying to learn how to really process their feelings are familiar with the concept of “I try to let/whatever has to pass through me pass through.” Lorde goes a step further and admits, “But this is staying a while, I know/it might not let me go.” I know what that’s like, too, to sit on my couch and have the thought I’ll never get over this. Moments like these don’t succumb easily to reasoning or platitudes about time healing wounds. Sometimes the only thing to hold onto is a tiny seed of hope that in a year all this anguish could seem silly.

The beauty of getting to that year later can be seen by what Lorde does in Solar Power (2021). Her songwriting was focused on the beauty of the world and the things she loves, how everything has worked out to bring you to that moment. I’ve gotten there. I think about all the friendship breakups and the failed jobs—without them, I would never have the beautiful life I have now. However, I too come back to my Melodrama, like Lorde does with Virgin. Humans will never run out of things to process, to work through, to wonder, Yeah, what WAS that?

Virgin, as we have it so far, seems to be a return to self. If Pure Heroine (2013), Lorde’s debut album, is about friends and growing into yourself, then Melodrama is about coming to terms with your identity being informed by all your experiences, including the beauty and grief that come with them. Solar Power, with its eco-centric themes, follows the journey of someone who has discovered their place and influence in a vast world. It taught listeners that eventually we can reach a point of security that allows us to turn our focus outward instead of in. Virgin is like a rediscovery of what Melodrama found, a callback to anyone who has the lyrics and beats still living in their minds. Virgin’s lead single, “What Was That,” begs the rhetorical question in synth-pop, hoping not for an answer but for the possibility of releasing a feeling that “might not let me go.”

Your 20s are the perfect time for that, and Lorde has been speaking to our experiences. A generation has grown up feeling understood because someone sang the ineffable. And just when you think you understand yourself and the world, something else happens, like a breakup or acknowledging the relationship you have with your body, like Lorde discusses in her Rolling Stone interview. Life is about constant discovery and rediscovery, and it can be good, too. In the process of becoming an official adult, or what we perceive one to be, it’s easy to reject the things that brought us joy or consider them “childish.” In that same interview, Lorde describes laying in the grass with headphones and smoking for the first time in years. These acts made her feel like a teenager again, part of a “journey…to return to her old self.”

Recently, I planned my whole day around the premiere of the new season of Phineas and Ferb. I’ve been on a three-month job search, applying for things I’m both qualified for and totally overqualified for, only to get no response or be ghosted after two interviews. The job market sucks, even with a college degree and lots of job experience. Somehow, eating a homemade cheeseburger while tuning into the season premiere of a cartoon I started watching in elementary school was the best I’ve felt in weeks. As we’ve heard from Lorde over the past twelve years, when life gets more complicated, joy doesn’t have to be. “What Was That” is a call to moving forward by feeling it all.

Lorde’s fourth album, Virgin, releases on June 27, 2025. Keep an eye out for an album review from Harley Nguyen of The 20-Something Files.