For her latest video, “Fallen Fruit,” Lorde returns to the same beach where she filmed the clip for “Solar Power,” but this time, things aren’t quite so idyllic.
The video shows Lorde, wearing a two-piece, strapless beige gown, walking slowly through pathways lined with flowers and fruit, and daytime beach scenes where people seem to be working or playing. That’s intercut with scenes of her in the same outfit, walking through those same scenes at night — except now, everything seems to be wrecked, strewn about or set on fire.
At the end of the clip, Lorde walks down to an empty beach, intercut with her walking on the beach at night. At night, there’s a car waiting for her, and a driver who slips a coat around her shoulders and hands her a bottle of water before driving her away.
It’s all very metaphorical, and in a newsletter to fans, quoted by Uproxx, Lorde explains, “In the ‘Solar Power’ video, you were introduced to the island as a lush paradise — glistening water, blue skies, not a grain of sand out of place…Cut to: humans doing as they do, getting greedy, treating the land with disrespect and stripping it of its beauty. There’ll always another pristine place to start again, right?”
She adds, “The gardens that were once lush and fruitful are now on fire. The fishing boats are busted up and overturned. All that’s left of the peaches are their pits. Amid all that, my character makes a choice.”
“Fallen Fruit” is from Lorde’s latest album, Solar Power.
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.