Horny Lorde Summer: 'Hammer' by Lorde Music Video Review
The day before summer’s official start, Lorde released her new track ‘Hammer’ and a corresponding music video, showcasing a true visual representation of the feeling of all-consuming lust.
The video starts with flashing imagery of Lorde sitting peacefully with pigeons on her shoulders, mimicking the urban adaptability of pigeons that convey the natural world or “peace in the madness over our heads”, which she later sings. Lorde grounds herself in the sensations of lust, not distracted by city life, but reclaimed from its potential to deprive her bodily connection.
Getting straight to the point about her unabashed horniness she says “There’s a heat in the pavement, my mercury’s raising. Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation. When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail” - revealing a modern Gatsby-like depiction of summer heat’s dueling tension and passion, fueling her need for touch, with tinges of feeling desperate for anything to relieve the aching.
Rebirth imagery appears - with Lorde curling herself into a fetal position in a womb-like netting and submerging herself in muddy waters - paired with rebirth language like “I might have been born again. I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers”. Lorde makes it apparent that the uncertainty is her freedom, the not knowing is the reason she can bask in this beautifully chaotic & lustful state.
Lorde expresses fluidity in gender expression - “some days I’m a man, some days I’m a woman” and ambiguous desires in what she desires from a person - is it lust, intimacy, connection, love, or all of it? Lorde doesn’t frame ‘uncertainty’ as a danger or feeling of being ‘lost’, but rather reclaims it as a liberating sense of just simply being - an invitation to live in flux, because when will the flux really end?
In this season, Lorde might not be certain about all things, none of us are, and we likely shouldn’t be. But what we do know is this summer Lorde wants to smoke cigarettes, frolic in a lake with friends, eat packed homemade sandwiches in a wet T-shirt, get tattoos and piercings, dance, and, makeout. And isn’t that an invitation to us all?
Get granular with what you want to experience this summer and how you want to feel. Visualize it from the smallest grains of taste and touch. Find your people who allow you to act on your summer desires and embrace the heat, in all forms. You can’t suppress the intense vibration summer brings; you must allow your body to unapologetically succumb to it - ‘burn’, ‘sing’, ‘scheme’, and ‘dance’. New mantra xx
