Lorde of all she surveys

On the melancholic yet monumental song 'What Was That', the alt-pop queen plays to her strengths.

- Mark Beaumont

When Lorde gets ghosted, it’s like Banquo at the feast. “Do you know you’re still with me, when I’m out with my friends?” she sings huskily at the spectral memory of a teenage sweetheart and long-term drug buddy, now off with someone else instead. Yet the New Zealand alt-pop icon’s sudden return with “What Was That” – her first single in four years, announced a week ago and heralded with an NYPD-bothering mime-along in New York’s Washington Square Park for the video – is the fan equivalent of the phantom of their own teen obsession booty-calling from nowhere for a bittersweet reminisce.

Her first chapter involved making herself instant alt-pop royalty with 2013’s