Lorde Announces 'Going South' Photo Book That Inspired Her Next Album

She's very excited to start showing off her "new world" soon. Lorde went on a wintry walkabout last year and now you can experience it with her. In an email to fans on Tuesday (Nov. 24), the singer announced the upcoming release of GOING SOUTH, a 100-page photo book of images from her 2019 trip to the real land down under, Antarctica. The first 500 copies of the book will featured a postcard signed by Lorde.

But perhaps most importantly, the "Green Light" singer revealed that she was so inspired by journey that it helped kickstart her next creative adventure, which she promised to "start showing you soon."

At press time the release date for the softcover book had not yet been announced. Summer is just starting in her native New Zealand, Lorde noted in her letter, bragging that she's already had two swims and eaten her first tomatoes of the season from her container garden. She goes on to run down the other vegetables in her growing menagerie (French beans, snow peas, Thai chilis, mesclun, Malabar spinach, zucchini) and suggests some shows to watch during the continued lockdown.

"In early 2019 I took a trip to Antarctica, funded and facilitated by the lovely folks at Antarctica New Zealand," she wrote. "The continent has fascinated me since I was old enough to read. It started to interest me again in recent years as my environmental awareness went up and up, and questions about how to change my personal and professional footprints on this Earth occupied much of my time."

She went on to explain that her friend and photographer Harriet Were came along to document the trip on old-school film, promising that the pictures turned out "so beautiful. I thought it was only right to make them into a little catalogue-style book, alongside a piece of writing I did about my experience on the frozen continent."

The singer, who recently explained why she decided to ditch social media to find a sense of peace, said when she went on the trip she hadn't yet started writing again after releasing her 2017 sophomore album Melodrama and she realized afterwards that her brain had been craving an excursion to an "alternate realm. Albums live in their own realms in a way, and Antarctica really acted as this great white palette cleanser," she wrote.

"A sort of celestial foyer I had to move through in order to start making the next thing. In the plane coming down to land, I had this very intense bolt-of-lightning thought, which in all its eloquence was literally, 'DON'T MAKE S--T RECORDS,' lol."

And then came the real news. The trip was so inspiring that Lorde said it will stay with her forever and that she's super grateful it showed her the "beginnings of the new world which I continue to build, and am very excited to start showing you soon." She called the book the "perfect precursor" to the new album, but, like, in an abstract way. "It's a cool little piece of the Lorde cinematic universe for you to own if you'd like to," she said.

The book won't be ready in time for Christmas, but there is a gift involved, as all net proceeds from sales will go towards a scholarship fund for an Antarctica New Zealand postgraduate scholar to study the science of climate change.

See the letter below and some pics from her trip.