“In early 2019 I took a trip to Antarctica, funded and facilitated by the lovely folks at Antarctica New Zealand,” she wrote. “The continent has fascinated me since I was old enough to read. It started to interest me again in recent years as my environmental awareness went up and up, and questions about how to change my personal and professional footprints on this Earth occupied much of my time.”
She went on to explain that her friend and photographer Harriet Were came along to document the trip on old-school film, promising that the pictures turned out “so beautiful. I thought it was only right to make them into a little catalogue-style book, alongside a piece of writing I did about my experience on the frozen continent.”
The singer, who recently explained why she decided to ditch social media to find a sense of peace, said when she went on the trip she hadn’t yet started writing again after releasing her 2017 sophomore album Melodrama and she realized afterwards that her brain had been craving an excursion to an “alternate realm. Albums live in their own realms in a way, and Antarctica really acted as this great white palette cleanser,” she wrote.
“A sort of celestial foyer I had to move through in order to start making the next thing. In the plane coming down to land, I had this very intense bolt-of-lightning thought, which in all its eloquence was literally, ‘DON’T MAKE S–T RECORDS,’ lol.”
And then came the real news. The trip was so inspiring that Lorde said it will stay with her forever and that she’s super grateful it showed her the “beginnings of the new world which I continue to build, and am very excited to start showing you soon.” She called the book the “perfect precursor” to the new album, but, like, in an abstract way. “It’s a cool little piece of the Lorde cinematic universe for you to own if you’d like to,” she said.
The book won’t be ready in time for Christmas, but there is a gift involved, as all net proceeds from sales will go towards a scholarship fund for an Antarctica New Zealand postgraduate scholar to study the science of climate change.
See the letter below and some pics from her trip.