Lorde Releases New Song 'Green Light' and Video

“This is that drunk girl at the party dancing around crying about her ex-boyfriend who everyone thinks is a mess”

By Amy Phillips.

Finally: After a week of teasing, Lorde is back with a new song called “Green Light,” along with an accompanying music video, directed by Grant Singer. Watch it below. The track, co-written and co-produced by Lorde and Jack Antonoff, is taken from Melodrama, Lorde’s follow-up to her 2013 debut Pure Heroine. (Lorde and Antonoff actually co-wrote and co-produced the entire album. Antonoff also appears in the video.) In a new interview with Zane Lowe on Beats 1, Lorde revealed that “Green Light” is about “my first major heartbreak.” “It's not something that I really am used to writing about,” she said. “It took me a while to be able to figure out how to write about that.”

In the Zane Lowe interview, Lorde described "Green Light" further:

The song is really about those moments kind of immediately after your life changes and about all the silly little things that you gravitate towards. I say, “She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a liar”. What the f***, she thinks you like the beach?! You don’t like the beach! It’s those little stupid things. It sounds so happy and then the lyrics are so intense obviously. And I realized I was like, “how come this thing is coming out so joyous sounding?” And I realized this is that drunk girl at the party dancing around crying about her ex-boyfriend who everyone thinks is a mess. That’s her tonight and tomorrow she starts to rebuild. And that’s the song for me.

In a series of tweets yesterday, Lorde called “Green Light” “very different, and kinda unexpected. it's complex and funny and sad and joyous and it'll make you DANCE.” She added, “it's the first chapter of a story i'm gonna tell you, the story of the last 2 wild, fluorescent years of my life. this is where we begin.”

In the time since Pure Heroine, Lorde put together a Hunger Games movie soundtrack, co-wrote a song with Broods, and collaborated with Disclosure on “Magnets.” She’ll appear at a few festivals this year including Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Governors Ball, as well as on "Saturday Night Live" next week.

Read “Tracing Lorde’s Little Clues About Her Sophomore Album” on the Pitch.

This story originally appeared on Pitchfork.

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