Lorde Summer Is Nearly Upon Us

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The now 28-year-old Lorde is bringing crumpled white shirts, carabiner clips and water bottles to the function this summer, predicts Daisy Jones.

Every year, for reasons that aren’t completely clear but feel somehow logical, we must christen the summer months. Last year was obviously brat summer . It was so brat that the history books won’t even attempt to describe it, they’ll just dye the pages acid green and stub some cigarettes out on it.

The year before that belonged to Barbie , although that feels like forever ago. Now, I suspect, we are on the brink – the cusp, the precipice, the edge – of something different. And by that, I mean: Lorde summer is nearly upon us.



It all began when the 28-year-old musician – who now has a battered rainbow water bottle as her profile pic across social platforms – released a TikTok snippet of her striding through Washington Square Park in a crumpled white shirt and jeans jangling in carabiners, while her new track “ What Was That ” played in the background. This was then followed by an impromptu performance in said park, which, from the phone footage, consisted of some jerky dance movements atop a makeshift wooden platform (I can’t lie – it got me feeling quite pumped). Now, she’s released a music video in which she runs and cycles through the streets of New York in the aforementioned outfit (the question here is not “what is she running from?” but in fact “where is she running to, and can we come too?”).

While the impending Lorde summer might be adjacent to brat summer (“MDMA in the back garden” “This is the best cigarette of my life”), they are crucially quite different, vibes-wise. If brat summer was all about snagged tights, stiletto boots and strobe lights, Lorde summer is more about long hair, normcore ’fits and a sort of whimsical energy. Lorde summer is breaking your phone and not caring about it.

It’s meeting some hot guy and then never speaking to him again. It’s leaving the party alone on a Lime bike, just because. My colleague Olivia Allen describes it as “a muted take on the leftover teen angst that never really left our systems” (she’s just like me for real), and “staying out all night because you actually want to”.

It’s worth considering Lorde’s age here, and the age of her fans, who have grown up alongside her. While we all went through a barefoot, sober, 12-step skincare routine era in our mid-20s ( Solar Power ) after the rabid hedonism of our early 20s ( Melodrama ), your late 20s and early 30s are a bit like a second, much wiser and less miserable youth. You’re up for the party but not the grimy afters, you’re into fun and romance but not gut-wrenching situationships and, yeah you like a ciggie sometimes but you’re not a proper “smoker” anymore.

And, look, if you want to bring a battered rainbow water bottle to the function then you will. You’re 28! You can do what you like! I have this theory that we are never more ourselves than at the age of 17 (there’s a reason that so many of our favourite pop songs – including “What Was That” – are obsessed with this age , although that’s a different conversation entirely). We then sort of lose ourselves before finding ourselves again around the age of 30 (see: your Saturn Return ).

This idea is integral to Lorde summer, I think – it’s a second teendom, but with better jeans and a sturdier sense of self. Brat summer was fun. But Lorde summer? That’s about to be freeing.

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