The Art of Transformation: Lorde, Talia Chetrit, and the Visual Language of “What Was That” (2025)
April 27, 2025
When Lorde reemerges into the public eye, it is never simply with a song. It is an event — an unfolding, a slow, reverent peeling back of layers to reveal something raw and newly constructed. This spring, the New Zealand-born singer-songwriter unveiled “What Was That,” her first original solo release since 2021’s Solar Power, signaling a creative rebirth not only through sound but through image. The cover portrait for the single, captured by American photographer Talia Chetrit, crystallizes this transformation into a single frame: intimate, jarring, unadorned, and resolutely human.
Lorde first shared the news via her social media channels on April 16, 2025, accompanied by the stark cover image — a close-up photograph of her face, seemingly glistening with sweat. The portrait is both arresting and unsettling, a direct confrontation with the viewer that offers no place to hide. “Soon,” she promised fans with characteristic understatement, before the official release date was revealed. But already, the tone was set: this was not a mere continuation of her past work. It was something else entirely.
In a voice message dispatched to her most devoted followers, Lorde spoke candidly about the moment of transition she was stepping into. “I just wanted to say hi, because everything is about to change,” she said. “These are the last moments where it’s just us, which is crazy. But so right. I’m so ready.” There was no elaborate rollout, no high-concept teaser campaign — just the artist herself, vulnerable and bracing, preparing her audience for a coming wave of evolution.
The choice of Talia Chetrit as the visual architect of this return was deliberate and telling. Chetrit, based in New York, is widely recognized for her provocative, often disorienting approach to photography. Her images frequently challenge conventions of identity, exposure, and intimacy, employing technical precision to achieve effects in-camera rather than relying on digital manipulation. In many of her works, faces are blurred, masked, or fragmented, forcing viewers to reckon with the instability of perception itself. Chetrit’s photography confronts rather than flatters; it invites the uncomfortable questions that polished commercial images are designed to suppress.
In pairing herself with Chetrit, Lorde signals a departure from pop’s traditional reliance on hyper-glossy, idealized self-portraits. The “What Was That” cover is almost anti-pop in its aesthetic: it is sweaty, stark, corporeal. Lorde’s face, set against a plain background, offers no accessories or costume to distract. Her expression is blank, ambiguous — unreadable. There is no curated narrative of glamour or heartbreak; instead, there is simply presence, magnified to an almost claustrophobic degree. This is Lorde not as an icon, but as a body moving through a turbulent world.
Chetrit’s artistic philosophy resonates with the themes Lorde has long explored in her music. From the disaffected teenage chronicles of Pure Heroine to the dazzling, wounded opulence of Melodrama, and the sun-kissed existentialism of Solar Power, Lorde has consistently wrestled with questions of selfhood, visibility, and emotional authenticity. Yet with What Was That, both in song and in image, there is a distinct shift: a refusal to romanticize the process of transformation. Growth, here, is sweaty. It is uncomfortable. It is ordinary and profound all at once.
Chetrit herself is no stranger to the act of turning the camera on those closest to her. Her body of work often features intimate portraits of her child, her partner, her parents — people whose familiarity makes their captured images simultaneously tender and uncanny. In choosing to work with Chetrit, Lorde invites that same uneasy intimacy into the pop sphere, breaking down the often rigid boundary between celebrity artifice and private selfhood.
Chetrit’s career has steadily built a reputation for such fearless explorations. In 2023, she mounted her first solo museum exhibition in the United States at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut — a show that foregrounded her interest in the interplay between exposure and concealment. Her work has been acquired by major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, affirming her status as one of contemporary photography’s most vital, if elusive, voices. Exhibitions at Sies + Höke in Düsseldorf and kaufmann repetto in Milan and New York further cemented her international acclaim.
In selecting Chetrit for the “What Was That” artwork, Lorde continues a tradition of enlisting contemporary artists to frame her visual worlds. For her 2017 album Melodrama, she collaborated with Brooklyn-based painter Sam McKinniss, whose vivid, blue-saturated portrait of Lorde captured the emotional highwire act of the record. Melodrama, widely regarded as a millennial masterpiece, chronicled the ecstasy and devastation of young adulthood with almost operatic intensity — and McKinniss’s painting, with its theatrical palette and luminous intimacy, perfectly mirrored that spirit.
By contrast, the cover for 2021’s Solar Power opted for a photographic approach, shot by Lorde’s longtime friend and photographer Ophelia Mikkelson Jones. That image, taken from a ground-up angle, depicted Lorde mid-leap, silhouetted against a sun-drenched sky. It conveyed a sense of liberation and sensuality — a retreat from the nocturnal turmoil of Melodrama into the elemental pleasures of earth, sea, and body.
Yet where Solar Power offered an escape, What Was That confronts. The sweaty, barefaced image by Chetrit strips away the mythos of rebirth-as-bliss and instead renders change as something messier, more ambivalent. The close-cropped frame forces viewers to sit with Lorde’s corporeality, her vulnerability — and perhaps their own.
Thematically, this collaboration suggests that Lorde’s new musical chapter will grapple with the spaces between memory and aftermath, visibility and obscurity, hope and fatigue. The song itself, a pulsing, synth-drenched exploration of a disintegrated relationship, is filled with lyrical snapshots of fleeting ecstasy and the disillusionment that trails behind. “We kissed for hours straight, well, baby, what was that?” she asks in the chorus, her voice weaving between confusion and resignation. It is a question that could just as easily be posed to the dizzying blur of youth, or to the act of reinvention itself.
“What Was That” thus becomes more than a song; it becomes a thesis statement. It is a refusal to package grief into digestible catharsis, a refusal to airbrush change into a narrative of triumph. It is an acceptance of transformation’s most uncomfortable realities: the sweat, the uncertainty, the loss of bearings.
Chetrit’s portrait amplifies these ideas without needing to spell them out. The sweat, the intense gaze, the raw skin textures — these are not incidental details but central components of the story. Lorde is not performing agony or transcendence; she is simply existing in the in-between.
At a time when celebrity imagery is often filtered into oblivion, polished to a luminous sheen that strips away any vestige of human complexity, Lorde’s choice to foreground her bodily reality feels quietly radical. It is an invitation — perhaps even a dare — to imagine pop not as spectacle but as lived experience, replete with all its awkward, beautiful, disconcerting contradictions.
In the history of album and single artwork, there have been pivotal moments when an image encapsulates not only an artist’s new phase but a broader cultural mood. Think of Patti Smith’s Horses portrait, stark and androgynous; or PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, hair flung wild and unkempt; or Fiona Apple’s Tidal, with its haunting close-up of teenage vulnerability. Lorde’s “What Was That” cover belongs to this lineage — an artifact that refuses to resolve itself neatly, insisting instead on complexity, discomfort, and radical honesty.
It remains to be seen where this new path will lead Lorde in the coming months: whether the forthcoming album will expand upon the synth-driven unease of “What Was That” or venture into still more experimental territory. But one thing is certain: she is once again reshaping the parameters of pop, pushing against the easy narratives, and reminding us that the truest stories are the ones that resist tidy endings.
Talia Chetrit’s photograph — unvarnished, immediate, and disarmingly intimate — is not just an accompaniment to this moment. It is a manifesto.
And in that stark, glistening gaze, Lorde signals not a final arrival, but the beginning of yet another fearless departure.
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