Last month, world-dominating pop star Lorde joined the club of celebrities praising Rosalía’s new album Motomami. “I’ve listened to the Rosalía album every day since it came out,” she wrote in a newsletter. “F*ck, it’s so good, I gagged when I heard that interpolation of ‘Archangel,’ ‘Hentai’ is genius, ‘Sakura’… projects like this remind me why I live for pop music — at its best, there’s nothing better.”
So it makes sense that the “Royals” singer covered “Hentai” at her show last night at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. The piano-driven ballad and Lorde’s smooth Spanish surprise the crowd; it’s a vulnerable moment that then spills into one of Lorde’s most intimate and beloved songs, “Liability.”
When Lorde first released Solar Power, she revealed that she didn’t let herself read any reviews. “I can only look at food websites because I don’t want to see myself anywhere,” she explained. The singer compared seeing herself online to eating too much sugar: “Baby me would have just eaten the sugar and gotten the headache, whereas now I’m gonna take care of myself. I feel like I can see my world and myself a lot clearer now. Everyone has that experience in their early to mid-20s – you can’t see yourself that well for a while and then it starts to sharpen.”
Watch Lorde perform “Hentai” above.