Before releasing her new album Virgin, Loïde talked about her new gender identity for the first time. Now, she’s announced that the next single from the album will be “Man of the Year,” a song about accepting her manhood.
The pop star posted the cover art for the song on Instagram on Monday (May 19). It was a close-up of her chest with a strip of duct tape covering it, and the bottom of her jeans could be seen sticking out of the frame. She wrote, “Man Of The Year.” Giving something from deep inside me.
“On Virgin, the song I’m most proud of,” Lorde said. “Coming out next week.”
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With “Man of the Year,” which comes out June 27, Virgin fans will get their second song. The artist from New Zealand released “What Was That” in April, and it debuted at No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In her May cover story for Rolling Stone, Lorde talked about writing “Man of the Year” after she stopped using birth control and found that she felt more female than she thought. She put duct tape on her chest right before writing the song, just like it looks on the cover, to try to create a picture of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt at that moment,” she told the magazine.
She went on, “I felt like I had cut some kind of cord between myself and this controlled femininity” by stopping taking her birth control. It sounds crazy, but I felt like I was no longer a woman all of a sudden. It made me believe that that made things possible.
In the end, Lorde teased “Man of the Year” with her 2025 Met Gala outfit, which included a strapless, slate-colored fabric strip that was stuck to her chest to look like the cover art for the song. “This is my work,” she told Emma Chamberlain of Vogue on the red carpet at the time. This is kind of like an Easter egg… For me, it really shows where I am as a woman. “I feel like a man and a woman.”
With the release of Virgin, which comes after 2021’s Solar Power, the “Royals” artist has finally talked about how her gender identity is changing. She told Rolling Stone that Chappell Roan asked her, “So, are you nonbinary now?'” She still uses the pronouns “she” and “her.” “I told myself, “Some days I’m a woman, and other days I’m a man.””
Lorde has also said that getting over her eating disorder, which was another event that influenced Virgin, helped her accept who she really is. She recently told Document Journal, “I had made my body very small because I thought that was what women did to show off their bodies.” “It made me feel completely unrooted.” I was really weak. Now that I look back, I don’t feel like I’m flying away as much.
