Lorde strips down to the bare basics

The pop star takes her new LP on the road with a mission to be 'radically transparent.'

- MIKAEL WOOD POP MUSIC CRITIC

“THIS IS gonna sound weird, but I honestly feel like ‘Virgin’ is my first album as a woman,” says Lorde. Her Ultrasound tour makes a stop Saturday at the Forum.

(SCOTT A GARFITT Invision / AP)

A hot late-summer breeze blows across a Burbank parking lot as Lorde sits beneath a tattered canopy outside the rehearsal studio where she's preparing for her latest world tour.

The 28-year-old singer and songwriter from New Zealand has been here for 10 days figuring out how to bring her album "Virgin" to the stage; in a few hours, she'll fly home to New York for a friend's wedding before heading to Austin, Texas, for the tour's opening date.

First, though: one final run-through of the show with the dancers she’s recruited to complement her own movement, which she describes as “quite wild and difficult to corral.” To ready her body, she ordered in Japanese last night, then had somebody administer an IV vitamin drip as she thumbed through an issue of the New Yorker. “Real pop-star behavior,” she says with a laugh. “The IV comes to me.”

THISTLE BROWN "THE LESS the better," says singer-songwriter Lorde about the no-frills approach she's been taking.

Born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, Lorde broke out at age 16 with “Royals,” her stark and whispery debut single — “a speech barely scaffolded with melody,” she calls it now — about the illusory satisfactions of a consumer culture run amok. “Royals” topped Billboard’s Hot 100 for nine straight weeks in 2013 and went on to win two Grammys, including the award for song of the year.