Lorde has been shaping the world of pop music for decades at this point. If you weren’t enthusiastically dancing around to “Royals” and “Green Light” at some point after their releases, you’re probably lying to yourself.
This year, Lorde entered that landscape once again with her first studio album in four years, Virgin, as well as an accompanying world tour. That work has landed her on Vulture and New York Magazine‘s “Culturati 50,” a crop of entertainers and creators who helped shape the pop culture of 2025. Instead of any sound bite or insight on Lorde’s own output, one quote from that feature has gone viral… for an unexpected reason.
Part of the “Culturati 50” feature included asking the creators about their own pop culture tastes, resulting in a fascinating snapshot of what they liked or didn’t like from the past year. One of the topics brought up was Season 3 of The White Lotus, which featured the following blurb from Lorde:
“I’ve watched all the seasons of White Lotus. The first season was hard to top, but I’ve completed the mission, so something’s working on me. It just feels like one of the few shared cultural events that we have. I wanna know what happened, you know? I loved the incest story line. I was like, “You guys are all prudes. Come on. Let’s go for it. Bring the teeth! Freak us out, Mike!”
Of course, Lorde is referring to the arc between Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan Ratliff (Sam Nivola), two brothers whose boundaries appear to erode over the course of their stay in Thailand. Ultimately, after getting intoxicated on multiple substances during a late-night party, Saxon learns that he and Lochlan were physically intimate with each other… which makes him have a crisis of conscience.
Lorde’s out-of-context quote has quickly gone viral since the piece’s publication, with fans and detractors alike clutching their proverbial pearls on social media. But this is a situation that does benefit from a bit of nuance — not only with regards to the article, but to Lorde’s recent proclivity for soundbites like this.
What was that?
The “Culturati 50” piece is basically the results of a poll between its celebrities, with both quantitative and qualitative responses on what plot lines or events resonated the most. The Ratliff brothers’ arc was the clear winner of the poll’s “most uncomfortable plotline” with 54% of the vote. (Another White Lotus moment, Sam Rockwell’s bizarre and binary-breaking monologue, earned 13% of the vote.)
Lorde’s quote is presented as a celebrity’s “Counterpoint” (one of several to various topics in the article) to the larger consensus. Hell, right above it is a quote from Succession and Nobody Wants This star Justine Lupe, who argues that: “The incest made me uncomfortable, but I was kind of annoyed that people were angry about it being in there. They were like, ‘Oh, it’s just too much. Why would he do that?’ Like, That’s fucking Mike White, guys. It made me uncomfortable, but I wasn’t like, I don’t want that to be part of this.”
It certainly sounds, based on the quote from the piece, that Lorde and Lupe are on a version of the same page: that there was artistic value in The White Lotus “freaking us out” with that storyline. There’s a whole larger conversation to be had about art and viewers’ personal comfort these days, and it’s undeniable that the Ratliff brothers’ arc contributed to that, even as it centered on a massively taboo extreme. When Season 3 was airing, the dread and drama over whether or not Saxon and Lochlan would cross that problematic line commanded a lot of the weekly conversation around the show. It felt like the kind of “can’t look away” rubbernecking that people usually associate with car crashes.
On paper (and out of context on social media), Lorde holding that storyline in high regard might cause a stir… but it’s not the first or last time that she has relished in those kinds of messy feelings. She has navigated (and reckoned with) her gender identity throughout the Virgin era, to the point of Chappell Roan flat-out asking her in person if she was nonbinary. And she already caused a stir similar to this White Lotus ordeal earlier this year, after her take on the complexities of the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape went viral.
Maybe Lorde is just one of those celebrities whose sound bites don’t translate well to out-of-context viral tweets. Maybe people are quicker to judge those out-of-context quotes from someone who has been under the microscope of the entertainment industry for almost half her life, and whose career has evolved into some unexpected places in that time. Maybe people have just forgotten how weird the conversation was when Season 3 of The White Lotus is airing.
(featured image: Joseph Okpako/WireImage)
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