MUSIC PREMIERES
Lorde offered a full breakdown of her long-awaited new single, “Solar Power,” during an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music One Friday, June 11th.
The track, Lorde said, was borne during a summer on Martha’s Vineyard, when she came back from a long day of swimming and began playing around with a Yamaha DX keyboard. She said the melody reminded her of Robby Williams’ song “Rock DJ,” and when she later took the song’s skeleton to producer Jack Antonoff, she set about capturing a distinct summer vibe.
“We had all the windows open. It was summer. And then we just followed it through,” Lorde said. “I sampled cicadas on my phone for the last few summers. I was like, it has to have the cicadas in it. I really wanted to capture [that] there’s something so specific about the New Zealand summer.”
Along with the Robby Williams nod, Lorde cited Primal Scream’s “Loaded” as a major influence on the track. While Lorde said she arrived at the melody organically, she cited the 1990 Madchester classic as “100% the original blueprint for this,” and said Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie even offered his approval.
“I wrote the song on the piano and then we realized like, this is, it sounds a lot like ‘Loaded,’” Lorde said. “It’s just one of those crazy things that like, they just were the spiritual forebears of the song. I reached out to Bobby and he was so lovely about it. And he was like, you know, these things happen. You caught a vibe that we caught years ago. And he gave us his blessing.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Lorde spoke about inviting Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo to provide backing vocals on the song, marking the first time she’s had other vocalists sing on one of her songs. “I just knew it had to be a gang,” she said, adding, “the sentiments were not just mine alone to deliver. So yeah, it really it’s everything I hoped it would be in terms of having other people on it. It’s fun not to be alone. Finally.”
And Lorde offered a bit of a teaser for her forthcoming album, saying it, too, was inspired by both a steady process of rejuvenation and New Zealand summers. “I think people realize that about me now, I’m one who has to go away and figure it out and I’ll be back and I’ll bring you a full universe when I come back, but it takes me a minute,” she said. “And I feel like you can hear that in the work and the whole album. When we do sit down and talk about it, it just felt light and casual and playful, and that’s the zone that I’m in.”
After first rising to prominence with the expansive, 1980s-inspired dream-pop of ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ and its standout tracks, Ethel Cain has spent much of her artistic journey trying to step away from that sound. She’s leaned into a moodier mix of drone, ambient rock, and raw analogue textures. “I’m not a fucking pop artist,” the Tallahassee singer once told The FADER, adding, “I reject that wholeheartedly.” Her experimental projects ‘Perverts’ and ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ make that stance very clear, and her latest tour often feels like a firm break from the softer sounds that brought her into the spotlight.
For the first of her five headline nights at Hammersmith Apollo, Hayden Anhedönia builds a scene that feels like a slightly playful, gently eerie B-movie graveyard. She spends most of the performance tucked inside a moss-covered altar, surrounded by dramatic lighting and a crucifix mic stand. The show is nearly silent when it comes to onstage chatter. The rare moments she does address the audience are understated and easy to miss. When a fan shouts their love for her, she responds with a simple “Thank you!” from the darkness.
Instead of walking the stage to build energy, the lighting design carries that weight, mirroring the intensity of her songs. During the gritty, heavy ‘Dust Bowl’, she sings inside a slowly circling beam of light that sweeps across the Apollo with piercing brightness, while strobing green and white lights heighten the tension during long instrumental passages.
Ethel Cain. Credit: Connie Burke
As the warm, rough-edged guitars of ‘Knock At The Door’ fill the room, the production shows it can match the strange, atmospheric side of Cain’s catalogue, even if those moments are rare tonight. The set doesn’t lean heavily on ‘Perverts’, but brief pieces of ‘Houseofpsychoticwomn’ and the title track make their way in. The industrial ballad ‘Vacillator’ appears in full, bathed in stark white light as she softly sings, “If you love me, keep it to yourself,” on a track heavy with buried emotion.
For the most part, the night is devoted to ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’. The album slows the cinematic Southern Gothic of her debut ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ and explores the dizzying pull of a teenage love triangle. The shimmering synths of ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ and the lush strings of ‘Nettles’ bring an early glow, before the performance drifts into hazy ambient dream-rock reminiscent of Grouper. The mood is thick and steady, though it lacks big shifts in dynamics, leaving the set on a single emotional wavelength.
When ‘Tempest’ is briefly stopped and restarted so medics can help an audience member, ‘Waco, Texas’ follows as the main set closer. The encore then pivots toward older material, shifting the tone entirely. After a heartfelt ‘A House in Nebraska’, Anhedönia steps out from behind her green altar for the first and last time, moving into the brighter side of her discography with ‘Crush’ and ‘American Teenager’. Even though she has expressed discomfort with her most well-known tracks, their contrast with her darker material gives the finale a powerful lift. After holding the room in quiet tension for so long, their arrival feels like a release that lands with even greater impact.
