Age, Biography and Wiki
Lorde, whose real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, was born on November 7, 1996, in Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand, making her 28 years old as of 2025. She is a critically acclaimed singer and songwriter known for her insightful lyrics and mature worldview. Lorde rose to international fame as a teenager with her debut studio album Pure Heroine (2013), which featured the hit single "Royals." This single topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, making her the youngest solo artist to reach number one on the chart since 1987. She has won multiple awards including two Grammys in 2014 and received a Grammy nomination for her second album Melodrama (2017). Raised in Devonport, New Zealand, Lorde began her music career early, winning a school talent show at age 12 and later signing a development deal with Universal Music Group in her early teens.
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| Date of Birth | 7 November 1996 |
| Age | 28 Years |
| Birth Place | Auckland, New Zealand |
| Horoscope | Scorpio |
| Country | New Zealand |
Height, Weight & Measurements
Lorde stands at 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 meters) tall. Details on her weight and other body measurements are not widely published.
Lorde is noted for her unconventional pop sound and introspective songwriting. In a 2017 interview with NME, she declared "I don't think about staying in my genre lane". AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine characterised her style as primarily electropop, while scholar Tony Mitchell categorized her as an alt-pop singer. Upon the release of Pure Heroine, music critics described her music as electropop, art pop, dream pop, indie pop, and indie-electro, with influences of hip hop. Melodrama was a departure from the hip hop-oriented minimalist style of its predecessor, incorporating piano instrumentation and maximalist electronic beats.
| Height | 5 feet 5 inches |
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Dating & Relationship Status
Current public information about Lorde's dating or relationship status is limited, as she tends to keep her private life out of the spotlight.
They announced their engagement in 2014, after a 30-year relationship, and they married in a 2017 private ceremony on Cheltenham Beach. Lorde holds dual New Zealand and Croatian citizenship.
Lorde is the second of four children: she has an elder sister Jerry, a younger sister India, and a younger brother Angelo. They were raised in Auckland's North Shore suburbs of Devonport and Bayswater. At age five, she joined a drama group and developed public speaking skills. Her mother encouraged her to read a range of genres, which Lorde cited as a lyrical influence. More specifically, she cites the young adult dystopian novel Feed (2002) by M. T. Anderson as well as authors J. D. Salinger, Raymond Carver and Janet Frame for influencing her songwriting.
After a suggestion from a school instructor, her mother had her take the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities to determine her intelligence. The results concluded that Lorde, age six, was a gifted child. She was briefly enrolled at George Parkyn Centre, a gifted education organisation. Sonja unenrolled her, however, citing social development concerns. As a child, Lorde attended Vauxhall School and then Belmont Intermediate School. While attending Vauxhall, she placed third and first respectively in the North Shore Primary Schools' Speech competition, a national contest, in 2006 and 2007. Lorde and her Belmont team were named the runner-up in the 2009 Kids' Lit Quiz World Finals, a global literature competition for students aged 10 to 14.
In May 2009, Lorde and her friend Louis McDonald won the Belmont Intermediate School annual talent show as a duo. In August that year, Lorde and McDonald made a guest appearance on Jim Mora's Afternoons show on Radio New Zealand. There, they performed covers of Pixie Lott's "Mama Do (Uh Oh, Uh Oh)" and Kings of Leon's "Use Somebody". McDonald's father then sent his recordings of the duo covering "Mama Do" and Duffy's "Warwick Avenue" to Universal Music Group (UMG)'s A&R executive Scott Maclachlan. Maclachlan subsequently signed her to UMG for development. Lorde was also part of the Belmont Intermediate School band Extreme; the band placed third in the North Shore Battle of the Bands finals at the Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna, Auckland on 18 November 2009. In 2010, Lorde and McDonald formed a duet called "Ella & Louis" and performed covers live on a regular basis at local venues, including cafés in Auckland and the Victoria Theatre in Devonport. In 2011, UMG hired vocal coach Frances Dickinson to give her singing lessons twice a week for a year. During this time, Maclachlan attempted to partner Lorde with several different producers and songwriters, but without success. As she began writing songs, she learned how to "put words together" by reading short fiction.
When Lorde and Little had finished their first collaborative effort, The Love Club EP, Maclachlan applauded it as a "strong piece of music", but worried if the EP could profit because Lorde was obscure at the time. In November 2012, the singer self-released the EP through her SoundCloud account for free download. UMG commercially released The Love Club in March 2013 after it had been downloaded 60,000 times, which signalled that Lorde had attracted a range of audiences. It peaked at number two in New Zealand and Australia. "Royals", the EP's single, helped Lorde rise to prominence after it became a critical and commercial success, selling more than 10 million units worldwide. It peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, making Lorde, then aged 16, the youngest artist to earn a number-one single in the United States since Tiffany in 1987, and has since been certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The track won two Grammy Awards for Best Pop Solo Performance and Song of the Year at the 56th ceremony. From late 2013 to early 2016, Lorde was in a relationship with New Zealand photographer James Lowe.
Lorde grew up listening to American jazz and soul musicians Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke, Etta James, and Otis Redding, whose music she admires for "harvesting their suffering". She also listened to her parents' favourite records by musicians including Cat Stevens, Neil Young, and Fleetwood Mac in her early years. During production of Pure Heroine, Lorde cited influences from electronic music producers, including SBTRKT, Grimes, and Sleigh Bells, impressed by "their vocals in a really interesting way, whether it might be chopping up a vocal part or really lash or layering a vocal." She also stated that she was inspired by the initially hidden identities of Burial and the Weeknd, explaining, "I feel like mystery is more interesting." Other inspirations include Katy Perry, Grace Jones, James Blake, Yeasayer, Animal Collective, Bon Iver, the Smiths, Arcade Fire, Laurie Anderson, Kanye West, Prince, and David Bowie.
Lyrically, Lorde cited her mother, a poet, as the primary influence for her songwriting. She also named several authors, including Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver, Wells Tower, Tobias Wolff, Claire Vaye Watkins, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, and T. S. Eliot as lyrical inspirations, particularly noting their sentence structures.
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Net Worth
Lorde's net worth is estimated to be around $16 million, accumulated through her successful music career and associated ventures.
Social Network
Lorde maintains an active presence on social media platforms to connect with her fans worldwide, though specific follower counts and accounts are not detailed here. She is well known for engaging with audiences through music releases and social campaigns.
On Melodrama, Lorde's songwriting showed signs of maturity with introspective, post-breakup lyrics. The album was released in June 2017 to widespread critical acclaim; Metacritic placed it second on their list of the best-received records of 2017 based on inclusions in publications' year-end lists, behind Kendrick Lamar's Damn. It debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200, giving Lorde her first number-one album on the chart, and on record charts of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It earned a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year at the 60th ceremony. Two other singles from the album were released: "Perfect Places" and a remix of "Homemade Dynamite" featuring Khalid, Post Malone and SZA.
In early 2024, Lorde began teasing her upcoming fourth studio album in a series of cryptic Instagram posts. Several posts included English record producer Dev Hynes. In March 2024, Lorde covered Talking Heads' "Take Me to the River" as the third single from A24 Music's Everyone's Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense. In June 2024, Lorde collaborated with Charli XCX on a remix version of the song "Girl, So Confusing". In September 2024, Universal Music Publishing executive VP and co-head of U.S. A&R Jennifer Knoepfle, stated that they had "signed Lorde earlier this year" and that the "Girl, So Confusing" remix was her first release as a UMPG song writer.
In April 2025, Lorde cleared her Instagram feed and posted a snippet of new music onto TikTok, which was subsequently labelled "WWT", short for "What Was That". On 22 April, Lorde played the track in full to a crowd at Washington Square Park, New York City, following a planned pop-up event that was shut down by the NYPD. On 24 April, "What Was That" was released along with its music video; the track presents a synth-pop style reminiscent of Melodrama (2017). On 30 April, Lorde announced Virgin to be released on 27 June 2025. On 8 May, she announced that she would promote it with a concert tour titled Ultrasound World Tour, beginning in September 2025.
When writing her second album, Melodrama, Lorde took inspiration from the melodic styles of a variety of musicians, including the 1975–especially their song "Somebody Else", Phil Collins, Don Henley, Rihanna, Florence and the Machine, Tom Petty, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Robyn. During the recording process, she stated that Frank Ocean's 2016 album Blonde inspired her to eschew "traditional song structures." She frequently listened to Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland while riding subways in New York City and on taxi rides on the way home from parties in her hometown of Auckland. She cited the 1950 science fiction short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury as inspiration for much of Melodrama's story, relating it to her own realities she faced.
Regarding her songwriting process, Lorde explained that the foundation to her songs began with the lyrics, which could sometimes stem from a singular word meant to summarise a specific idea she had tried to identify. For "Tennis Court", Lorde wrote the music before lyrics. She stated that the songwriting on Pure Heroine developed from the perspective of an observer. Similarly, in an interview with NME, Lorde acknowledged that she used words of inclusion throughout her debut album, while her follow-up Melodrama presented a shift to first-person narrative, employing more introspective lyrics inspired by Lorde's personal struggles post-breakup and viewpoints on post-teenage maturity. Lorde's neurological condition chromesthesia influenced her songwriting on the album; it led her to arrange colours according to each song's theme and emotion.
Lorde's stage name illustrates her fascination with "royals and aristocracy"; she added an "e" after the name Lord, which she felt was too masculine, to make it more feminine. She described her public image as something that "naturally" came to her and was identical to her real-life personality. Lorde identifies as a feminist. The New Zealand Herald opined that her feminist ideology was different from her contemporaries due to Lorde's disinterest in sexualised performances. She proclaimed herself in an interview with V magazine as a "hugely sex-positive person", saying, "I have nothing against anyone getting naked. ... I just don't think it really would complement my music in any way or help me tell a story any better".
Critical reception of Lorde is generally positive, with praise concentrated on her maturity both musically and lyrically. The New York Times called her "the pop prodigy" who was not conformed to boundaries and always sought experimentation. Billboard recognised Lorde as a spokesperson for a "female rock resurgence" by introducing her works to rock and alternative radio, which had seen a traditional male dominance. The publication also named her the "New Queen of Alternative" in a 2013 cover story. Journalist Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic towards Lorde's styles, labelling the singer as "a pop property" that was indistinguishable from other mainstream artists.
During the buildup to, and during the rollout of Lorde's fourth album Virgin, her gender identity was speculated on, following a shifting in her dress sense, as well as posts on social media. Lorde later told Emma Chamberlain in an interview at the 2025 Met Gala that she felt "like a man and a woman", and later revealed to Rolling Stone that Chappell Roan had asked if she was non-binary. In the same interview, she self-described as a "cis, white woman" in context of discussing her privilege on the topic of trans rights.
Education
Lorde was educated in New Zealand, though specific details about her formal education are not extensively detailed in public sources. Her mother, a poet, encouraged her love of literature, which deeply influenced her songwriting.
