Lorde’s long-awaited album Solar Power arrives next week, and she’s hitting back at people saying she’s part of Jack Antonoff’s “stable”—her word, delivered “with some edge and more humor”—of collaborators. Antonoff (Bleachers, fun.) is, of course, a super-producer/songwriter who has worked extensively with the likes of Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Clairo, Pink, Carly Rae Jepsen, St. Vincent, Troye Sivan, the Chicks, and Sia, among others. He contributed to many of the songs on Lorde’s 2017 sophomore album Melodrama.
In a new profile in the New York Times, the New Zealand artist referred to a growing narrative among her critics that she made “a Jack Antonoff record” instead of a Lorde record, which she called “insulting” and “sexist.”
“I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff record,” she said. “I’ve made a Lorde record and he’s helped me make it and very much deferred to me on production and arrangement. Jack would agree with this. To give him that amount of credit is frankly insulting.”
Lorde also suggested that speculation regarding the nature of her relationship with Antonoff is “retro,” and that there are elements of Antonoff’s distinct production and songwriting style she likes, and others which she’s not a huge fan of.
“I know that there are certain hallmarks of what Jack does and some of those things I really love and some of them I don’t like,” she added. “And I beat them out of the work that we do together. I say this with so much love and affection, but I feel like we’re doing up a house together and he’s like, ‘Look at this serviette that I fashioned into the shape of two swans! Look at this set of woven baskets!’ And I’m like, ‘Great—one per room.’”
Solar Power is set to drop on Aug. 20, over four years after the two-time Grammy-winner’s Melodrama. So far she’s shared the title track and “Stoned at the Nail Salon.”
Antonoff, meanwhile, just dropped his third record as Bleachers in July, featuring Bruce Springsteen and Lana Del Rey. Like Lorde, it had been more than four years since he released his second studio album under the moniker.
