What do you do when the mirror starts talking back? If you’re Lorde, you duct tape your chest, slip into someone else’s jeans, and write a song about the version of yourself that only exists in the split second before the world tells you who you should be.
“Man of the Year” isn’t just a track—it’s a ritual. A glitch. A manifesto for anyone who’s ever shape-shifted to survive.
Gender? Performance? No Answer Required.
Lorde’s new single, dropped May 29, is a deliberate swerve—a quiet explosion in the middle of the hyper-coded gender conversations we’re all choking on in 2025. It’s three minutes of skin-on-skin friction: vulnerability, confrontation, disassociation.
She describes it herself as the song she’s “most proud of” from Virgin, her soon-to-drop fourth album. But it doesn’t even sound proud. It sounds exhausted, intimate, a little dangerous.
This isn’t pop spectacle. It’s a self-leak.
That Cover: Duct Tape and Denim
Forget glamour. The single cover is an act of temporary sabotage: Lorde in men’s jeans, chest taped up, gold chain catching the light—looking like she’s about to run away from her own body. She called it “imperfect and impermanent,” and that’s exactly why it hits.
The image came to her after quitting birth control, a raw, hormonal renaissance that cracked open something more than just her physical self.
Call it gender play. Call it embodiment. Call it glitch-femininity. She doesn’t care what you call it.
The Sound: Underproduced on Purpose
Co-produced with Jim-E Stack, the track is sparse. Airy synths, a heartbeat rhythm, vocals that don’t beg for your approval—they’re just there, like the flickering fluorescent light above a bathroom mirror at 3 AM.
No massive hook. No “Royals” callback. Just Lorde, glitching between selves.
“Man of the Year” is for the gender nonconforming kid taping their chest before school. For the person standing in the club bathroom trying to breathe through a panic attack. For anyone whose body has been a battleground and a blank canvas, sometimes in the same night.
It’s not an anthem. It’s a glitch.
And we’re here for it.
Final note: Lorde isn’t becoming a man, or shedding being a woman. She’s reminding all of us that there are more ways to be than we’ve been taught
And here our emotional tracker:
Ivan Gorini – Freelance Journalist
Divergent Beats 
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