Before she became the globe-trotting, chart-topping, Nirvana-fronting household name she is today, Lorde was just another music-obsessed teenager mucking about with fellow high schoolers in a band with dreams of making it big.
Now we actually get to to hear what the teenage band in question sounds like, as a handful of tracks featuring a then-16-year-old Ella Yelich O’Connor surface online.
And They Were Masked is a New Zealand band that describes themselves as “future noir”, listing the likes of the Mars Volta, PJ Harvey, Fugazi, Bloc Party, Battles and others as influences on their Facebook page, and two cuts from their Characters album – released circa May 2012 – feature vocals from a pre-‘Royals’ Lorde, as fansite Lorde Daily (via Consequence Of Sound) has discovered.
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‘Sands Of John’ prominently features her distinctively velvety croon, framed by stop-start rhythms and a brooding cacophony of mandolin, guitars, growling bass, and skittering drum patterns. You can already hear the maturity in her delivery that would wind up on her debut, Pure Heroine, even if the musical backing is worlds away.
Another track, ‘Piece of Mind’, sees Lorde simply providing a few snatches of back-up vocal as part of the seven-strong lineup, on a track that’s closer to King Crimson or experimental folk music than anything resembling her eventual solo work.
You can hear both songs below and head to And They Were Masked’s Bandcamp to hear/buy the rest of Characters.
The warm beam of Lorde spotlighting hasn’t been lost on And They Were Masked, who took to their Facebook in response to “the internet [going] kinda crazy” over the attention, leading to Lorde fans buying up physical copies from the band that are no longer available.
“We’ve been rather inactive for the past two years and as a result there were also some issues with paypal payments for digital downloads that I’m currently sorting,” writes the page’s administrator, “I don’t wanna take anybody’s money without any music in return;” urging affected customers to get in touch.
It’s not the first the star-hungry internet has unearthed material from a pre-fame Lorde. Last November, footage of Lorde (aged 12) performing at her school’s Battle of the Bands competition also turned up online, showing Lorde filling the shoes of Ronnie James Dio on a cover of Rainbow.
Jumping back to 2014, Lorde recently announced that she will be curating the soundtrack for the latest entry in The Hunger Games movie franchise, working on music for the film adaptation of Mockingjay from the best-selling book series. She’ll drop the lead single for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 album on 21st November.
The Kiwi superstar is also concurrently working on material for the follow-up to last year’s Pure Heroine, remarking that her new songs will be “totally different” in tone and style to her previous work.
“I think I’ve learned so much as a songwriter, there’s going to be so much of an improvement because of that,” she recently told BBC. “I wrote the last album about that world which was the suburb where I grew up and populated by my friends and people who were really familiar to me. Now I’m in a different place every day and I’m with new people every day and it’s a different vibe.”
