On Thursday, Lorde released “Man Of The Year,” the second single from her forthcoming fourth album Virgin. Described by the artist as the song she’s “proudest of” on the album, “Man Of The Year” is a down-tempo ballad about the complicated journey of self-love. In the accompanying video, Lorde removes her shirt and sticks duct tape over her breasts, emphasizing her overarching theme of expanding gender expression.
In an interview with Australian radio show triple j, Lorde revealed she conceived the track after attending GQ’s 2023 Man of the Year event. “It was funny, I had been feeling this expansiveness of gender happening for a while, and this was my first event that I’d been to in a while, and I wore a kind of ‘hot girl’ dress, and I felt so not like myself. And it was a really cool marker, especially being at this event that was celebrating all these cool guys, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m one of those guys—sometimes, when I wanna be. And I was like, ‘Whoa, I don’t think the hot girl dress is the right device for this moment.'” The next day in the studio, she decided to write a track about “how I’m the Man of the Year for me.” The resulting song is “very pure” expression of feeling her gender “broaden and shift and bust out of me in this way that was really amazing to me and also really scary and emotional.”
The back-to-back releases of “What Was That” and “Man Of The Year” echo the release of Melodrama‘s first songs “Green Light” and “Liability”: the first an ecstatic, dance-forward breakup anthem and the second a more subdued meditation on being alone. On “Liability,” Lorde sings of her relationship with herself as “the only love I haven’t screwed up.” Similarly, on “Man Of The Year,” she wonders who, besides herself, is “gonna love me like this?” Years later, she’s found peace in solitude and strength in self-knowledge, even if it burns down the relationships that came before. The video taps into the joy and fear of evolution as she dances and rages in the dirt.
