Lorde reveals eating disorder, psychedelic drug use in new Rolling Stone interview

Lorde has revealed she was battling an eating disorder while touring for her third album Solar Power in 2022 and used psychedelic drugs to help fight her personal demons.

The 28-year-old, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O’Connor, made the revelations in an interview with American magazine Rolling Stone, which she graces the cover of for the June edition.

The Grammy Award-winning artist recently released her single 'What Was That' from her first album in four years, Virgin, which also touches on what she has been dealing with and will be released on 27 June.

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When the pandemic started, she began obsessing over her size, counting calories and monitoring her protein intake, she told the magazine. Even later while touring in 2022, she had not realised she had developed an eating disorder.

“I don’t know how those two things can be true: that I’m having this really amazing, rich experience of playing the shows and meeting these kids [her fans], and [yet] I’m also looking at the pictures afterward and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy, thinking it was so unforgivable what I had allowed it to become."

As well as self-loathing, she had reportedly been covering up the mirrors in her home.

While she admitted to the magazine she was still on a journey to return to a healthy relationship with her body, she said putting an end to the obsession of counting and tracking her diet was the starting point.

“Once I stopped doing that, I had all this energy for making stuff,” Lorde said, “I could see that if I cut that cord, maybe I would get something back that I needed to do my work. And it was totally true. Got it all back, and way more.”

Lorde also told Rolling Stone that between 2022 and 2024 she used MDMA and psilocybin therapy to get over her stage fright, which she experienced since the age of 5 when she was performing in community theatres.

On the change she felt after drug therapy, she said: “I would play ‘Supercut’ and all of a sudden there was a hook around my guts and everyone in the room was having the same feeling, [like] there’d been a huge pressure change. It made me realise how much I love and kind of need that very deep, visceral response to feel my music.”

But it wasn’t just in her performances she felt a change. She says she felt the treatments made her appreciate herself and body more.

“[I’ve] been in the same body [my] whole life,” she said, recalling a realisation she had during those trips. “I understood it. I was like, ‘These arms climbed the jungle gym. And they held an award on a TV show.’ I understood the whole spectrum of it and began to enjoy the complexity and ruggedness.”

She added that giving her body more room to breathe meant her gender “got way more expansive”.

“[Chappell Roan] was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”

Although the singer is usually private about her romantic relationships, she confirmed to the magazine her eight-year relationship with Justin Warren, an executive at Universal Music in New Zealand, ended in 2023.

Writer of the cover story Brittany Spanos told Midday Report she spent several hours over two days with Lorde at her New York apartment.

“I think for a lot of people when they heard the ‘Girl, so confusing’ remix [with Charli XCX], and she has the line about being at war with her body, I think people started to sort of wonder what that meant and what she was going through.

“She was very immediately, kind of wanted to talk about it and talk about her experience, especially now where she feels a lot more healed, feels like she’s gotten through it and has found a healthier relationship with her body and with food.”

Spanos said she had heard a good chunk of Lorde's new album and there were lots of “big pop bangers” with “really intense raw lyrics”.

“It’s not like the past albums, I would say maybe the closest it’s to is Pure Heroine in terms of kind of the intensity and viscerality of it.”