While the impending Lorde summer might be adjacent to brat summer (“MDMA in the back garden,” “This is the best cigarette of my life”), they are crucially quite different, vibes-wise. If brat summer was all about snagged tights, stiletto boots, and strobe lights, Lorde summer is more about long hair, normcore ’fits, and a sort of whimsical energy. Lorde summer is breaking your phone and not caring about it. It’s meeting some hot guy and then never speaking to him again. It’s leaving the party alone on a Lime bike, just because. My colleague Olivia Allen describes it as “a muted take on the leftover teen angst that never really left our systems” (she’s just like me for real), and “staying out all night because you actually want to.”
It’s worth considering Lorde’s age here, and the age of her fans, who have grown up alongside her. While we all went through a barefoot, sober, 12-step skincare routine era in our mid-20s (Solar Power) after the rabid hedonism of our early 20s (Melodrama), your late 20s and early 30s are a bit like a second, much wiser and less miserable youth. You’re up for the party but not the grimy afters, you’re into fun and romance but not gut-wrenching situationships and, yeah you like a ciggie sometimes, but you’re not a proper “smoker” anymore. And, look, if you want to bring a battered rainbow water bottle to the function then you will. You’re 28! You can do what you like!
I have this theory that we are never more ourselves than at the age of 17. There’s a reason that so many of our favourite pop songs—including “What Was That”—are obsessed with this age, although that’s a different conversation entirely. We then sort of lose ourselves before finding ourselves again around the age of 30 (see: your Saturn Return). This idea is integral to Lorde summer, I think—it’s a second teendom, but with better jeans and a sturdier sense of self. Brat summer was fun. But Lorde summer? That’s about to be freeing.
