“I pulled this Moog bass forward… we were like, ‘OK, that feels kind of trashy’”: Lorde says that she needed to find “just the right amount of dirt” to finish her new single, What Was That

Lorde.

We’re guessing that Lorde must be pretty pleased about the warm reception that’s been given to her comeback single, What Was That. Not least because, as she recently confirmed, she was working on it for almost a year.

Asked by Radio 1’s Jack Saunders what she was looking for before she was ready to call a halt to the production, Lorde - real name Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor - said: “Just the right amount of dirt, but also elegance… It was really just me, like, listening to myself and being, like, ‘OK, now we can stop.’”