The Return of Lorde

Lorde, the New Zealand-born pop star, came into the fire-lit lounge of her downtown Manhattan hotel a few minutes past 11, apologizing for the lateness of the hour — funny story, she said. She’d been commuting daily to a Greenwich Village recording studio, plugging away at new music, but today U2, who had reserved the space, arrived and commandeered it. Lorde found a smaller studio available farther uptown, and though the move was inconvenient, she saw the humor in being inadvertently evicted by Bono — it was just one more marker of how strange her life has been since she became famous, four years ago, at 16. “I actually saw the Edge in the gym here,” she said with a grin. “I thought about saying something, but I decided, Nahhh.”

A late-winter blizzard was forecast to blow into town that night, and Lorde was dressed for the cold in pointy black boots and a voluminous Chloé overcoat whose wool folds hung around her like a midnight-colored cloud. Her hair fell to the collar in waves, and the overall effect, in the light of the fireplace, was of an extremely chic witch ready for a night of haunting. She’d sent me a message earlier on, hinting at some unspecified adventure: “Will txt you when i get out of the studio. i want to take you somewhere.” Now, boots clacking, she led me around the corner and into an elevator, where she fished a stubby key from her pocket. “We’re going out a secret way,” she said, turning a lock on the wall.

Lorde owns a house in Auckland, where she grew up, but for the better part of the last year she has been living at different hotels around New York, trying to finish her second album, “Melodrama.” She began writing it about three years ago, first in her childhood home and later at a villa she bought on what she described as the other, fancier side of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbor. Lorde has a neurological condition known as sound-to-color synesthesia — when she hears certain notes and sounds, corresponding colors appear — and she describes making music in intensely visual terms. “From the moment I start something, I can see the finished song, even if it’s far-off and foggy,” she said. Her goal is to correct the colors and sharpen the contours until the precise configuration of chords, rhythms, emotions and textures she has been glimpsing all along snaps into focus. “It’s about getting the actual thing to sound like what I’ve been seeing.”

The elevator opened onto a barren nether-floor, where Lorde took a narrow staircase down to a service exit. This hotel often hosted celebrities, she explained — “You might see Meryl Streep; you might even see a Jonas Brother” — who, in turn, drew photographers. She’d gotten this key from management so that she could come and go without worrying about cameras.

The album that made Lorde a celebrity, “Pure Heroine,” came out in 2013. It was a marvel of understatement — unhurried electronic beats, pared-down harmonies, empty spaces. Her lyrics brought an unlikely incandescence to avowedly mundane snapshots of suburban teendom. “Pure Heroine” sold more than one million copies in five months, making Lorde the first female artist with a million-selling debut album since Adele and establishing her as a wunderkind pop auteur. Kanye West introduced himself as a fan; Taylor Swift became a buddy; David Bowie clasped Lorde’s hands in his and proclaimed that listening to her music “felt like listening to tomorrow.” The question nagging her here in New York, as she worked to meet the new album’s June release date, was what the day after tomorrow sounded like.