Lorde’s new single “Hammer” is the sonic equal of getting by way of your 20s, realizing really you understand nothing about the world and your self, and saying “fuck it, let’s simply do no matter.” “I am able to really feel like I haven’t got thе solutions,” she sings on the track’s beating refrain, launched at this time, June 20, as the closing single of what is shaping as much as be a primal, career-pivoting mission for the singer. It is arms down the finest single from the bunch.

“Hammer” is not explicitly about approaching your late 20s, however I am decoding it as an age-anthem of kinds. On Instagram, Lorde says the track is an “ode to metropolis life and horniness.” However there are bits that additionally really feel like they communicate to the normal loosening of the grip on life that occurs when one begins to strategy that huge 3-0. “Some days I am a lady, some days I am a person,” Lorde sings in the first verse, alluding to the gender explorations that impressed loads of the forthcoming Virgin, out June 27. If Melodrama was Lorde crafting a good encapsulation of early 20s heartbreak and management, Virgin, arriving earlier than she turns 29, coincided with paring again and letting go. It is a return to the “actually important, pure” model of herself, she instructed Rolling Stone.

That letting go is throughout “Hammer” which bursts like a geyser, a furiously effervescent rush of drums constructed round a very addictive vocal oscillation that makes it sound like Lorde is dwelling it up proper subsequent to your ears. Like her earlier single, “Man of the Yr,” which slow-builds to a cathartic climax, there is a palpable sense of launch on “Hammer,” like a too-tight valve has lastly been loosened. Co-produced by the singer with Jim-E Stack, the track imbues that feeling on each stage, lyrically stuffed with flashes of unrestrained euphoria: a fountain’s mist hitting the face, an impromptu piercing on Canal St., getting an aura photograph taken, and not likely caring about your gender identification at this time as a result of does it actually matter?

What’s most evident on the monitor is how the singer’s songwriting has advanced. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Lorde stated that she strove to be “plain with language” this go round, and the impact this has had on her songwriting is most clear on “Hammer.” Sharp and vivid bursts of one-liners like “Do not know if it is love or ovulation” and “I am making a want when the needle goes in” construct right into a supercut-like montage of pure feeling. Dare I say they really feel much more evocative and elemental-provoking than the lyrical musings of Melodrama? Like the thesis of “Hammer” — a 28-year-old’s assertion of freedom — all this effort proves to me that life solely will get higher after your 20s.