Lorde feels "in the middle gender-wise"

The opening line on Lorde's upcoming album 'Virgin' is "Some days I'm a woman/Some days I'm a man."

And asked how she identifies now, she told Rolling Stone magazine: "[Chappell Roan] asked me this. 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.' I know that's not a very satisfying answer, but there's a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up."

She later noted: "My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room."

Lorde recalled taping her chest and the intense feeling she experienced because of it "not being a permanent solution".

The 28-year-old singer was writing a track called 'Man of the Year' and trying to visualise a version of herself that was "fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment", and she saw herself in men's jeans, a gold chain, and duct tape on her chest.

She added: "I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself.

"I have this picture staring at myself. I was blond [at the time]. It scared me what I saw. I didn't understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it."

Despite her feelings, Lorde doesn't feel her ideas about gender are particularly "radical" as she praised the "incredible brave" members of the trans community.

She said: "I don't think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest.

"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."

The 'Green Light' hitmaker believes coming off birth control at the end of 2023 for the first time since she was 15 helped her to "open up".

She said: "I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity.

"It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up."