Behold the Queen is back: Lorde releases her new album ‘Solar Power’

Lorde is a beautiful blend of modern and old. At 16, she released Royals, and here’s another perfect album.

The multiple Grammy-winning New Zealand singer and songwriter returns with Solar Power, her third album and the followup to 2017’s Melodrama, her first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.

Solar Power includes 12 tracks, including the previously-released title cut and “Mood Ring,” and sees Jack Antonoff return to the mixing desk.

Speaking with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in June, the singer went into details, explaining that her latest was a “joyful and big” recording, “and such a good thing to experience with a bunch of people.”

This summer, Lorde broke her silence to prepare her fans for the start of a new era: “There’s someone I want you to meet,” she wrote in a dispatch from her newsletter in June. “Her feet are bare at all times. She’s sexy, playful, feral, and free. She’s a modern girl in a deadstock bikini, in touch with her past and her future, vibrating at the highest level when summer comes around.” It wasn’t clear whether she was presenting a new song or a new persona when the pastel threads, alternative dance grooves, and beach blanket reveries of “Solar Power” arrived.