Lorde – 'Stoned at the Nail Salon'

Summer is not a season you’d typically pair with Lorde’s music. Her 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, was a nostalgic trip perfect for driving through the suburbs at night. Returning in 2017 for her critically acclaimed sophomore album, Melodrama, the production was fuller, more experimental and her lyrics considerably colder, more heartbroken; ‘Guess this is the winter, our bodies are young and blue’. 

So, four years later, how would Lorde make her anticipated return? ‘Solar Power’ is the sun-kissed, beach-ready lead single to her upcoming third album with the same title. It was an unexpected move, yet made so much sense considering her New Zealand roots. 

The second single, ‘Stoned at the Nail Salon’, is another acoustic guitar driven cut, but this time, arguably sadder. It’s a poetic piece of folky balladry that slips in and out of concrete memories and abstract thought, just as you would if you were… stoned at the nail salon. She sings about growing out of the music you loved at sixteen, spending evenings with the people who raised you, and beautiful girls fading like roses- aware of how time so quickly moves. However, she cuts off her existentialism prematurely in each chorus to remind herself that she’s high, in a state of limbo, and that’s probably why she’s thinking such things.

Jack Antonoff kills it on the production end, as usual. The layered guitars and vocals that are recorded super close, the dry harmonies panned across the track with help from none other than Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo, it comes together to create one of Lorde’s most intimate and raw songs to date.

The long-awaited album, Solar Power, drops August 20th. 

Words by Curtis Saunders

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