Earlier Monday, Lorde began teasing the release of her new … um, something. In the cryptic fashion of the modern promotional campaign, a video first aired on TV in Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s native New Zealand showed the singer, who has not put out a new original song since 2014, idly sipping from a Styrofoam cup in the back of a sedan, followed by the words “3.2.17 NYC” and “3.3.17 NZ.”
Reports already have a new, confidentially titled Lorde single hitting radio on March 7, so what, or who, is coming to New York and New Zealand at the end of the week? And what’s with the long-awaited follow-up to Lorde’s debut album, Pure Heroine? A further clue comes via Lorde’s Twitter feed, where this appeared a few hours after the video hit the web.
The site yields only the same video, but the page itself bears the title “M*******A,” which leads to further speculation. What are those asterisks replacing, exactly? The top-secret title of Lorde’s single, or her album—or did she just mistakenly tweet her password, Sean Spicer–style?
Sparing no expense, Slate headed directly to the nearest crossword-solving site to find nine-letter words that fill the bill. (We included a few that are a letter or two longer as well, just in case.) Could one of these be the name of whatever it is Lorde is teasing?
- Memoranda
- Minnesota
- Macadamia
- Macedonia
- Made in USA
- Margarita
- Manchuria
- Manzanita
- Marijuana
- Mauna Kea
- Mauna Loa
- Mea Culpa
- Megafauna
- Melodrama
- Metralgia
- Millennia
- Minnehaha
- Mishpocha
- Monomania
- Mona Lisa
- Montezuma
- Moratoria
- Massapequa
- My Sharona
- Myocardia
- Mike Piazza
- My Àntonia
- Mahna Mahna
- Miss Australia
You’ll just have to wait until March 2 to find out.
