Lorde has been opening up about her “more expansive” gender in the run-up to her new album, Virgin.

In an interview with Rolling Stone published this week, the “Solar Power” singer explained that MDMA and psilocybin therapy sessions, which she began in 2022 to help with her debilitating stage fright, also led to an improvement in her relationship to her body.

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“My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,” she told the magazine.

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Asked about her gender identity, Lorde said that fellow pop star Chappell Roan had asked her something similar.

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

As Rolling Stone notes, Lorde still describes herself as a cisgender woman and continues to use she/her pronouns. But she said she is “in the middle gender-wise.” And in “Man of the Year,” the opening track on Virgin, out June 27, she sings “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man.” The singer explained that while writing the song, she visualized herself in men’s jeans with duct tape across her chest. She said the image represented how the way she felt about her gender in that moment.  

Her look at the Met Gala earlier this month, which she described as “something of an Easter egg,” may have been a reference to that image of herself. At the May 5 event, the singer wore a custom Thom Browne ensemble composed of a floor-length skirt and a floating top, both in the same steely gray of duct tape.

“To me, it really represents where I’m at gender-wise,” Lorde told Vogue‘s Emma Chamberlain at the time. “I feel like a man and a woman.”

Similarly, in a recent interview with Document Journal, the singer described her new music as a result of her “really facing my body stuff head-on, and starting to feel my gender broadening a little bit.” She also said she was “coming into my masculinity a bit more” while recording the new album.

At the same time, in her interview with Rolling Stone Lorde acknowledged the privilege she has as a cis woman to explore different ways of expressing and experiencing her gender even as the current administration continues its all-out assault on the rights and freedoms of transgender Americans.

“I don’t think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,” she told the magazine. “I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated. Making the expression privately is one thing, but I want to make very clear that I’m not trying to take any space from anyone who has more on the line than me. Because I’m, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”

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