What do you suppose might be Lorde’s highlight from the last 12 months? Could it be her song, Royals, storming to No 1 around the world last autumn, when 12 months earlier she’d been plain Ella Yelich-O’Connor, just another 15-year-old mooching around her cataclysmically uneventful Auckland suburb of Devonport? How about winning two Grammys, or being invited to fill Kurt’s Converses at Nirvana’s Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction? Maybe following Gaga and Rihanna with her own range of Mac cosmetics? Or her showstopping Brits duet with Disclosure? There was probably something at least faintly above average about the experience of David Bowie looking her in the eye and telling her that listening to her music – a dramatic, layered but subtly smart take on pop – felt like “listening to tomorrow”.

Actually, she explains today in typical Lorde fashion, one of her highlights was to receive an email from Miranda July (“who is basically just A+”), offering an advance copy of her new book. “I’m such a fan,” she beams. “That I’m communicating with people I’ve been inspired by for a long time and that they want to hang out with me, or speak with me, and that there’s a sort of mutual appreciation, is pretty great.”

Earlier, during the Guardian's photo session, I’d noted Lorde’s mum Sonja quietly reading a book of her own. It was a vintage edition of Alice In Wonderland, she explained warmly, picked up the previous day at a market. She’d read it many times before, she’d said, in many different formats and editions. “The story,” she’d noted, “never changes.”

A girl falling into a fantasy world with a predictable outcome? Clearly this would be journalism-segue gold. I excitedly relay this news to Lorde, explaining that I’m tempted to view this as a parallel to the way in which pop eats, repeats and usually defeats itself, with special reference to how Ella – whose sparse, erudite pop nestles in charts alongside bumptious tripe espoused by party jam despots like Pitbull – has somehow changed the story.

“And then,” she shoots back, “I would mock you for being clumsy.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lorde. Photograph: Linda Nylind

In some respects our time together, during which Lorde demolishes a plate of fried chicken and corn on the cob while also decimating a series of questions and observations, has all the hallmarks of an interview from hell. She is so in control of the encounter that interviewing Lorde is, at times, a little more like being interviewed by Lorde. “I feel like that’s a base-level journalistic question,” she says at one point. She refuses to fall for the good old ‘say nothing and see what happens’ ploy, staring blankly back at me until I eventually crack and ask another question (“I learned about that trick quite early on,” she laughs). She makes a joke about me being old. So yes, it should be a nightmare. Instead, it’s glorious: she smiles a lot (“I just can’t do it on cue”), pokes fun at herself (she’s amused, she says, by online caricatures of her as “a grumpy, stompy witch child”) and, despite being impenetrable when she wants to be, can also be entirely straightforward.

Not having arrived today with any sort of agenda, she apparently simply fancies a chat. So a chat is what we have. She tells me that yesterday she had a go on Oculus Rift, a new virtual-reality technology, and how she experienced the sensation of being in a room watching a musician sitting in a studio. “It’s like being in someone’s filth,” she explains, “but on a pure level it’s nice. Kind of like communism.” She reveals that she’s written for other artists but can’t say who; though she did recently look at an online tutorial on how to draw a perfect circle. As you do. When we talk about Kanye, who accosted her and told her last year and declared himself a fan, she refers to him as being “like my school principal, if the school is pop”; on the topic of being or not being in love she smiles and says simply that “I’m a happy person”.

We’ve met once before, at the tail end of last summer when Royals already felt like a hit, but hadn’t yet become one. At that point she was still having to explain her meteoric rise; how her covers of songs such as Duffy’s Warwick Avenue had caught the ear of a Universal Music executive who’d signed her to a development deal in New Zealand when she was just 13, and how unsuccessful writing sessions eventually led to a creative partnership with producer Joel Little, which, in turn, led to an unexpectedly successful EP release that then paved the way for Royals. She’d also told me that was terrified of being 17. Today, she says the whole “being 17” business is panning out pretty well. “It’s all right,” she grins. “Though I feel like I get away with less. But I’m exactly where I want to be; it couldn’t really have gone much better.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lorde: 'I’m exactly where I want to be.' Photo by Linda Nylind. 10/6/2014.

After we met last year I feared that her frank views about, for instance, the way certain US artists engage with their fans, would get Lorde in trouble – to the point where some light media training might help her avoid calamity. I was right that her willingness and desire to speak freely caused a procession of rumpuses – even MTV has noted that Lorde is “the go-to source for journalists looking for an eye-raising assessment of her pop contemporaries” – but I’d underestimated how well she’d be able to handle the fallout, even when her frank critique of Justin Bieber plonked her at the centre of a Belieber shitblizzard.

“At the beginning, because I’m really interested in pop and pop culture and how things work and why something’s successful, I was just wanting to have a discussion about pop while forgetting that I was actually in it,” she says today. “Having the world weighing in on you from all sorts of different perspectives is intense, but the criticism I listen to most is what comes from people the same age as me; they’re the only people I care about liking my music. One consistent thing is that if I like something and nobody likes it, I still like it. If I don’t like something and everyone loves it, I still hate it.”

Lorde dissects the pop milieu with an intensity that puts clear blue water between herself and almost every other chart act. There seems to be simultaneously more and less to her than meets the eye, neatly summarised by this afternoon’s attire: for our lunch date she’s wearing an unassuming but stylish black dress, which seems very Lorde. It’s Armani, she explains, which seems marginally less Lorde. But then she stands up, awkwardly reaches into the neck of the dress and yanks out the shop tag, still attached because she’s planning on sending it back when she’s finished wearing it. That, once again, seems very Lorde indeed.

The image of a pop star, she’ll suggest later, is as much about what you can’t see as what you can, but this isn’t just confined to pop. “If you use the internet you’re crafting a version of yourself that you want people to enjoy,” she explains. “On Facebook, when I was 13, all my tagged photos were photos that I wanted to be there. All my status updates were typed in exactly the right syntax. My bio was just how I wanted it. Everything was perfect. But I’d look at people who’d cropped their face out of a larger picture, so I’d click on the picture and it would just be a tiny square in a black box.” The conspicuous cropping, she says, implies something to hide. “I’d see the tiny picture in the black box and I’d think: ‘This person just can’t do their PR very well.’ That’s all the internet is: doing your own PR.”

Doing this PR becomes slightly more difficult in the context of modern online fandom, where everything seems to become fan fiction. The 2012 screengrab of an unknown singer posting her new song Royals on 4Chan asking for feedback is almost too deliciously cute to be true and, in fact, is exactly that. Her fiery Grammys acceptance speech – censored when the show was broadcast but circulated online – would be all the more powerful were it not entirely fabricated. Then, of course, there’s the well-established internet fact that Lorde is actually 35 years old. “That sort of thing is quite meta,” she smiles. “The fake Grammys speech was a little lame. On the other hand, it’s amazing that they’ve dedicated a Subreddit to my ‘real’ birthdate. People revel in having an alien opinion, and I do, too. It’s important. It’s complete unfiltered democracy.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lorde. Photograph: Linda Nylind

It would be only polite to discuss some of Lorde’s forthcoming music. Sadly, there sort of isn’t any: album two is “hardly even started; it’s skeletal”, and Ella doesn’t know what it’ll eventually sound like. On a lyrical tip, she says she’s been thinking a lot about travelling the world, though she quells concerns that it’ll be a bit ‘I’m on a tourbus, boo-hoo’. “The first album was about a really small world that the listener isn’t in, and it felt like a very insular world,” she says. “Now I’m kind of a child of the world, I’m everywhere all the time. [Pause] Or whatever. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to explain. It’s about feeling displaced.”

With our time almost up we turn to her favourite Wikipedia page, which, she says, is one for the glass delusion, a psychological condition that affected, among other people, King Charles VI of France. “It’s thinking you’re made of glass,” she reports. “Visually it’s really appealing to me; I love the idea of a king being scared of sitting down. It combines a lot of things I like.” She sees me raise an eyebrow. “In no way does this appeal to me in a metaphorical way.”

But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that this is your favourite page? “You’re going to turn this into something aren’t you?” she hoots, and the planet’s best pop star is off again. “This is such a JOURNALIST way of doing things. But I sniffed it out.” She’s becoming animated. “It’s all about segues! ‘Interesting, isn’t it, that people crop their Facebook photos?’ … SEGUE! I mean, at least it was better than Alice In Wonderland; Alice was not good. It was pretty messy.”

She calms down again. “You know, I’m free to give you some media training, if you ever want any.”

Meet Lorde's new Royals

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ryan James Caruthers' self-portrait. Ryan James Caruthers

RYAN JAMES CARUTHERS Photographer, 19



“I first heard of Ryan when I saw one of his beautiful, tender self-portraits on Tumblr. I followed him, he turned out to be a fan; he ended up photographing me at one of my very first US shows. He recently walked as a model for Saint Laurent.”

AMANDLA STENBERG Actor, 15

"Amandla is known for The Hunger Games and Sleepy Hollow. She made an awesome short film adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman for her high-school film class.”

ARROW DE WILDE Fashion blogger and model, 15

“I think Arrow just recently started high school. She’s also the coolest human I have ever seen. She has a blog that rates the best Shirley Temples, and her mum Autumn takes really amazing photos of her where you can just tell she has this electricity in her brain.”

PETRA COLLINS Photographer, 21



“This is a young photographer I think is awesome – her photographs are delicate and confrontational, sexy and strong. She also participates in some cool roundtable-type discussions regarding the female body and modern feminism, and is a really fresh lady voice.”

KIERNAN SHIPKA Actor, 14



“Like Amandla she’s a pretty popular actress already – Kiernan played Sally Draper in Mad Men – but I’m convinced that Kiernan, like Amandla, is going to take over the world with her smarts, kindness and sass, as well as phenomenal talent.”