‘I felt so hungry and so weak:’ Lorde shares health struggles in Rolling Stone cover story

Friday, 16 May 2025

In a sit down interview with Rolling Stone magazine Kiwi artist Lorde shared her health struggles around her body and taking psychedelic drugs to free her mind.

The singer song writer recently announced her fourth album Virgin would be released next month but told Rolling Stone in their cover story how “terrified” she was to open up about the ‘rugged’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘messy’ songs.

The 28-year-old opened up about how the story of Virgin, in some ways, began before the release of her 2021 album Solar Power.

Dressed in sundresses and bright colours at the time, Lorde told Rolling Stone all she remembered feeling ‘was thin’. But not thin enough.

“I felt so hungry and so weak…I was on TV [that] morning, and I didn’t eat because I wanted my tummy to be small in the dress. It was just this sucking of a life force or something,” she said.

Lorde told Rolling Stone she was unhealthy ‘starving herself and obsessing over her size’, but not enough to raise alarm bells for the people around her.

She was reportedly consumed with counting calories and monitoring her protein intake, ‘a preoccupation that began during the pandemic’.

When it got to the North American leg of her Solar Power tour in April 2022, “she still hadn’t admitted to herself that she had an eating disorder”.

Before the tour Lorde said she set out to fix a different part of her life “the debilitating stage fright she’d grappled with since she was a five-year-old doing community theater”.

Rolling Stone reported that the treatment was MDMA and psilocybin therapy, which was a form of PTSD treatment .

Lorde said that over the course of many sessions between 2022 and 2024 she would take one of the psychedelic drugs and “let the euphoria free her body and her mind”.

“I was touring without stage fright for the first time,” she told Rolling Stone and was finally able to walk around big cities like Milan and Paris before a show “rather than rotting in her hotel room, terrified of having a panic attack and passing out onstage”.

Lorde said with her new album there will be a lot of people who won’t think she is a “good girl anymore, a good woman”. She said “it’s over”.

“It will be over for a lot of people, and then for some people, I will have arrived. I’ll be where they always hoped I’d be.”