Lorde Is Dropping Song Clues On Instagram Like Some Kind Of Taylor Swift

' Lorde Is Dropping Song Clues On Instagram Like Some Kind Of Taylor Swift'

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CREDIT: Steve C Mitchell/Invision/AP

Lorde, brilliant, dark-lipped mermaid from the sea who has a strange, intense fascination with teeth-as-metaphor, has a song on the upcoming Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 soundtrack. How does this crazy kid sustain our excitement for a song we haven't heard inspired by a motion picture that's months away from release? With strategically Instagrammed teasers, that's how.

On September 4, Lorde posted this image, cryptically captioned 'first line':

Today brought sneak peak number two:

And four days ago, she shared an image of the single art, revealing the song's title - 'Yellow Flicker Beat' - and the impressive fact that her name is in substantially larger text than the title of one of the biggest blockbuster franchises going:

Lorde's following in the savvy marketing footsteps of her buddy Taylor Swift (who, incidentally, had a song on the last Hunger Games soundtrack) with these itty-bitty leaks of personal-seeming intel - they're in her real handwriting, on her personal account! - that obscure far more than they reveal. Lorde's lyrics are always turning in on themselves, starting in one place and vanishing into another, the meaning of a word always morphing into something else. (My favorite example is here). She's one of the least-literal writers in the pop world right now.

Even without context, these two lines already have that sort of etheral, otherworldly quality to them that Lorde brings to her descriptions of everyday things, like riding the bus or living in the suburbs. The title, 'Yellow Flicker Beat,' could mean a million things or nothing at all. The lyric about being 'smoother than a storm' is technically illogical; storms aren't smooth, so what does that say about the princess?

Knowing a Lorde lyric is not actually that 'useful,' if what you want is to be able to use the clue as a way of predicting what you haven't yet seen. It's just this small gem unto itself, a line of poetry cutting through the sunsets and brunches on your Instagram feed, to get you hopeful for what's to come. She builds excitement with what amounts to little more than an illusion. Lorde is a magician.