Lorde – “Hammer”

Lorde – “Hammer”

We’re one week away from the release of Lorde’s Virgin, one of this summer’s most eagerly anticipated new albums. After releasing the early tracks “What Was That” and “Man Of The Year,” Lorde is back with one last single before the whole LP gets here. Her new track “Hammer” is a swirling, exuberant jam — not quite a dance song, but one that keeps threatening to turn into a dance song at any moment. On Twitter, she calls it “an ode to city life and horniness tbh.”

Lorde co-wrote “Hammer” with Jim-E Stack, her main Virgin collaborator and rumored romantic partner. The two of them co-produced it with Frank Ocean/Travis Scott collaborator Buddy Ross. It starts out with Lorde singing over a building, chattering drone. Her lyrics are about longing for connection, and they nod toward the gender exploration that she’s been discussing in interviews lately: “Now, I know you don’t deal much in love and affection/ But I really do think there could be a connection/ I burn and I sing and I scheme and I dance/ Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.” The whole thing seems to be building toward a climactic beat drop, but when that moment arrives, the track doesn’t quite go for catharsis. Instead, she and her collaborators strip everything back again.

Renell Medrano directed the “Hammer” video, and it’s almost certainly the horniest music video that Lorde has ever made. In the clip, she hangs out with pigeons, dances with friends, smokes weed next to a lake, and seemingly gets an ass tattoo. There are a bunch of shots where she’s naked in a mesh hammock. She looks like she’s having a good time. Check it out below.

Virgin is out 6/27 on Universal.

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