Lorde popped back into the world’s consciousness last year when she teamed up with Charli XCX for their “Girl, so confusing” remix. Now she’s revealed that Charli’s album Brat helped to inspire her new album, Virgin, which is due out June 27.

“I’d been kinda cooking this album up — we were, like, quite a way into it at that point, but Brat coming out really gave me a kick in a lot of ways,” Lorde tells BBC Radio 1.

“It forced me to further define what I was doing because Charli had so masterfully defined everything about Brat and I knew that what I was doing was very distinct to that.”

“And also, it’s amazing when a peer throws the gauntlet down like that,” she adds. “You’re like, ‘OK, yeah, we’ve gotta pick it up.’ I’ve spoken to a lot of peers who’ve all had the same feelings. It’s very sick and I’m so grateful to her.”

Lorde also notes that she was already writing songs “in this very naked way,” and the songs on Brat convinced her she was heading in the right direction.

“Doing the remix together and kind of meeting her in that place of, like, rugged vulnerability and kinda like cracking open the thing … people responded really well to that,” Lorde says. “I was like, ‘OK, OK, cool. This is a good thing to be doing.'”

On her website, Lorde describes her new album as “100% written in blood.”

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