During her headlining set at this year’s Primavera Sound festival, Lorde delivered a cover of Bananarama’s 1983 hit ‘Cruel Summer’.
The Kiwi singer has long been known to indulge in cover songs: in the past few months alone, she’s put her idiosyncratic spin on ‘Run Away With Me’ by Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘The End Has No End’ by The Strokes and ‘HENTAI’ by Rosalía.
Her ‘Cruel Summer’ cover came exactly halfway through her Primavera set – which she performed on the Pull & Bear stage last night (June 10) – sandwiched between ‘Mood Ring’ from last year’s ‘Solar Power’ and ‘Liability’ from 2017’s ‘Melodrama’.
Take a look at fan-shot footage of the performance below:
Lorde’s cover of “Cruel Summer” by Bananarama.
— Lorde Updates
(@LordeUpdatesBR) June 10, 2022
Lorde is currently on tour in support of ‘Solar Power’, her third full-length effort, which landed last August via Universal. The album scored a five-star review from NME, in which Rhian Daly wrote: “This is an album that grows in quiet stature with every listen, new nuggets of wisdom making their way to the surface, peeking through its beautiful instrumentation that weaves a stunning, leafy tapestry.”
Last week, Lorde thanked fans for the support she’d received following the album’s release, and revealed that she’s “getting nearer” to writing nothing but “bangers” again.
“It’s so interesting to me how writing a big, bright pop song has been the thing that’s defined my life,” she said onstage in London. “This thing I started trying to do when I was 14-years-old because I would turn on the radio and love that feeling, what it did to me. It became like an addiction, I just wanted to keep trying to construct the perfect thing that would hit you in the heart emotionally, over three-and-a-half minutes.”
She went on to say that while those big pop songs have been “the guiding force in [her] life”, she moved away from writing them after ‘Melodrama’ due to the state of current affairs. She continued: “We’ve had a really difficult, painful, lonely few years and artists take that, and they process it and they make something that’s maybe quieter, or more private. But the banger will always be on the horizon.”
In other news, Lorde has praised Kendrick Lamar‘s new album ‘Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers’, particularly noting the record’s emotional maturity and attempt to process difficult subjects through creative expression.
The post Watch Lorde cover Bananarama’s ‘Cruel Summer’ at Primavera Sound 2022 appeared first on NME.
