Alternative pop star Lorde has returned for her crown on new single ‘What Was That’

When Lorde gets ghosted, it’s like Banquo at the feast. “Do you know you’re still with me, when I’m out with my friends?” she sings huskily at the spectral memory of a teenage sweetheart and long-term drug buddy, now off with someone else instead. Yet the New Zealand alt-pop icon’s sudden return with “What Was That” – her first single in four years, announced a week ago and heralded with an NYPD-bothering mime-along in New York’s Washington Square Park for the video – is the fan equivalent of the phantom of their own teen obsession booty-calling from nowhere for a bittersweet reminisce.

Her first chapter involved making herself instant alt-pop royalty with 2013’s Pure Heroine album and exploring the art of stoic mainstream melancholy on its follow-up, Melodrama (2017), like a kind of Eva Perón of the glittery bikini. Lorde has since haunted pop’s background with the polarised response to 2021’s Solar Power, her self-confessed “weed album” that followed Taylor Swift into the tangled wilds of indie-folk and psychedelia. But last year’s collaboration with Charli XCX on a remix of “Girl, So Confusing”, along with a subsequent guest appearance at Coachella, signalled a revived interest in EDM and electropop, and “What Was That” certainly sounds like her comeback is out to stir up poignant memories of the good times.

“MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up,” she recalls, lacing producer Dev Hynes’ elegant rave beats with the breathy resilience of her trademark introspective dream pop, “We kissed for hours straight … I want you just like that”. And as she wanders New York a lonely dimension removed from reality – covering her mirrors, staring through her friends and wearing “smoke like a wedding veil”, a shadow presence pining for the past – she seems to embody exactly that rekindled flame.

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the track itself. If anything it’s an inch or two behind the times, relying heavily on the kind of snarly slogan hookline that Charli XCX owns now, the increasingly tired “shock value” of mentioning drugs or sex in pop songs, and a high-reverb vocal twist that will recall, for listeners old enough to remember Gossip Girl, “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People, or MGMT. But as a mode of reconnection, it gives Lorde’s subjects everything they want – vulnerability, confessional insight and further means to dance away the heartache. She rises again, to push pretenders from their stools.