Lorde has opened up about being diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) and recovering from an eating disorder during the making of her most recent album, Virgin, in a letter shared with fans.
The letter, published almost a year after Virgin's release, was shared alongside a collection of demo and skeleton versions of album tracks, released on streaming platform untitled.stream.
In it, the New Zealand singer wrote that she had been working on recovering from what she described as a "brief but long gestating" eating disorder while recording the album, including deleting calorie-tracking app MyFitnessPal and working on her relationship with food.
"The week we started what would become Shapeshifter and What Was That I was working on believing that breakfast wasn’t a negotiation. I made myself drink a smoothie every morning, went to work when I wanted to run away, kept trying, one foot in front of the other."
She also disclosed that a friend had noticed she seemed to fall into intense depression around her period each month. Some months later, she was diagnosed with PMDD — a severe form of premenstrual syndrome that can cause significant mood disturbances in the lead-up to menstruation.
In a postscript, she mentioned having googled burnout symptoms and said she was now on an SSRI and feeling better.
Lorde wrote that making Virgin had felt like an act of healing and self-liberation, describing every day of the process as "a total gift."
"I had the sense that I was setting myself free, building a holy site," she wrote. "I concentrated on singing to myself the way I needed to be sung to."
She said she had found it difficult to speak publicly about the album since its release, describing the experience of sharing it as "raw and exposing in a new way."
Lorde wrote that the X-ray images used on the cover were taken at a medical facility on March 2 last year, with her wearing both her grandmothers' jewellery during the shoot.
She described feeling "insane, off the map" as she waited to be scanned, with old fears rising that the machine would "reveal an ugliness and wrongness that went all the way to the bone".
The photographer, Eric Wrenn, put her at ease.
"He touched my hand, said softly, it will be perfect, it's a picture of you, any way you are today is perfect and right," she wrote.
She said the archival release was intended to be "realer, funnier, more revealing of crookedness and slant" than a conventional behind-the-scenes collection — less about the finished album than "celebratory of the way of travelling, the repetitions, the journey".
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