Lorde’s Man of the Year Lyrics Meaning: Duct Tape, Gender, and a Sonic Unbinding

Released on 29 May 2025 as the second single from her upcoming album Virgin, Man of the Year doesn’t offer a clean narrative arc—it’s a portrait in flux.

It follows the sparse and shadowy What Was That, but where that track quietly set the scene, this one bursts into a more visceral realm of identity, body, and reinvention.

This isn’t Lorde trying on a persona. This is her removing the last one.

“Man of the Year” by Lorde is a self-exploratory song about gender identity, bodily autonomy, and artistic reinvention. Written after a period of intense physical and emotional transformation, it reflects Lorde’s journey off birth control, her evolving understanding of femininity, and the visualisation of a freer self—shirtless, taped, and unfiltered.

“Glidin’ through on my bike, glidin’ through / Like new from my recent ego death”

The song opens with a calm that conceals upheaval. She’s not escaping; she’s surfacing.

The phrase “recent ego death” isn’t metaphor. It’s biographical. This line sets up the experience that shaped the track—her decision to stop hormonal birth control after a decade and the emotional spiral that followed.

“Sirens sing overnight, violent sweet music”

The duality is jarring by design. Violence and sweetness co-exist as she tries to navigate her own emotional terrain. Nothing in this moment is neatly defined.

The sirens aren’t danger or salvation—they’re both. The delivery sits slightly askew, like a dream you don’t remember correctly but can’t shake.

“Swish mouthwash” and “jerk off”

Instead of retreating to abstraction, she leans into detail. Mundane acts take on a ritualistic role.

The body is no longer set dressing—it’s the text. These fragments pull the listener into moments that are awkward, bodily, and lived, placed beside revelations that might otherwise feel too heavy to hold on their own.

“You met me at a really strange time in my life”

The lyric could’ve been a throwaway, but it lands like a timestamp. In 2023, Lorde had tried on a pair of men’s jeans and sent a photo to her longtime collaborator Jim-E Stack.

His reply was simple: “I want to see the you that’s in this picture represented in the music.” That image—raw, gender-nonconforming, unshaped—stayed with her.

“Take my knife and I cut the cord”

The symbolism isn’t poetic flourish—it’s real. Lorde has spoken about how going off birth control for the first time in ten years changed everything. 

“When I ovulated for the first time, I cannot describe to you how crazy it was. One of the best drugs I’ve ever done,” she said.

But the aftermath brought mood crashes she hadn’t anticipated, leading to a diagnosis of PMDD.

What emerged was a radical disconnect from the “regulated femininity” she’d inhabited for years.

She described it as severing a cord—cutting herself loose from expectations that had always been quietly shaping her.

“My babe can’t believe I’ve become someone else / Someone more like myself”

This lyric carries a tension that threads through the whole track. She isn’t reinventing herself—she’s excavating.

Becoming more like yourself doesn’t always look stable. It often looks like breaking something first.

“Who’s gon’ love me like this?”

There’s no dramatic wail here. Just a question, calmly placed. It acknowledges the personal risk of change—of visibility. When identity shifts, so does love, and Lorde leaves that possibility hanging in the air without resolution.

“Hear it for the man of the year”

The title finally arrives—but it lands with ambiguity. It’s celebratory and questioning. In a moment of visualisation, Lorde described picturing herself singing this song onstage: shirtless, in jeans, duct tape across her chest.

“I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, that’s me, that’s who I am. I really just like saw my body as an extension of the work of art.”

It wasn’t a performance decision. It was recognition.

The track begins with a deceptively stripped-down palette—acoustic tones, minimalism—but steadily grows denser.

Lorde isn’t aiming for a traditional arc; she allows the song to gather weight as it moves.

The production thickens gradually, anchored by warm synth textures, layered vocals, and a rhythm that builds without rushing the payoff.

This careful tension peaks not in spectacle but in release. Near the end, her voice stretches, the beat deepens, and the track enters a kind of exhale—sonically and emotionally. It feels like a room getting brighter, not louder.

She isn’t aiming to impress. She’s aiming to be accurate.

The visual is a single-space meditation: Lorde, alone, spinning in a chair, duct tape on her chest.

It’s unadorned, but charged. She isn’t stylised—she’s exposed, taped-up, caught mid-motion between vulnerability and assertion.

It’s the visual echo of the mirror moment that sparked the song’s genesis.

Lorde captured the spirit of this track in a string of phrases on her website:

“BIKING. SMOKING. SWIMMING. NEW STRENGTH IN MY SHOULDERS. FEELING SOMETHING AWAKENING. FIRST TAPING MY CHEST. SO SCARED TO BE HIM. […] THE SOUND OF MY REBIRTH.”

There’s no polish in that list. No resolution. Just momentum. Man of the Year doesn’t claim a new identity. It captures the heat of figuring one out—and Lorde, for once, lets us sit in it with her.

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Lorde Man Of The Year Lyrics

Verse 1
Glidin’ through on my bike, glidin’ through
Like new from my recent ego death
Sirens sing overnight, violent, sweet music
You met me at a really strange time in my life
Take my knife and I cut the cord
My babe can’t believe I’ve become someone else
Someone more like myself

Chorus
Who’s gon’ love me like this?
Oh-oh, oh, who could give me lightness?
Let it flow down to me
Love me like this
Now I’m broken open?
Mm-mm, uh-huh-uh

Verse 2
Now I go ’bout my day riding it like a wave
Playing it any way I want
Swish mouthwash, jerk off
Uh-uh, uh-uh-uh
Days go by in the haze (Ts, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh)
Stay up and sleep late (Ts, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh)
(Ts, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh)
(Ts, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh)

Chorus
Who’s gon’ love me like this?
Oh-oh, oh, who could give me lightness?
Way he flow down through me
Love me like this
Now I’m broken open
Let’s hear it for the man of the year
Mm-mm, uh-huh-uh
Hear it for the man of the year
Mm-mm, uh-huh-uh

Outro
How I hope that I’m remembered
My gold chain, my shoulders, my face in the light, oh
I didn’t think he’d appear
Let’s hear it for the man of the year
Hear it for the man of the year
Let’s hear it for the man of the year