In the wide-ranging interview, she discussed her new-found confidence in the Solar Power era and her leap across the beach with an "unapologetic crotch shot".
"When I said I felt young for the first time—it meant feeling like I'm confident enough to put my butt out there. I wouldn't have been able to do that as a teenager," she told Vogue.
"When you're really famous as a young person, feelings get magnified.
"At that time, people were discussing my body on Twitter, and the natural response was to shrink away from it. Now I have a sense of my worth and my power, and my body is —awesome, for one thing. But it's also not as central as my brain is to the whole operation. I don't think you could make me feel bad about myself now by saying something about my body, but that's the difference between 16 and 24.
"When I talk about being playful in the making of this album, there was, for want of a better word, a sexual component to that. Engaging the natural world in a big way is like a flirtation. That's how it felt to me. Playful and joyful and a little bit nasty."
She tells the writer her albums can be distinguished by the drugs she was using by making them.
"Pure Heroine is alcohol, Melodrama is MDMA, and Solar Power is cannabis - not bong hits in the bedroom so much as gummies on a bluff at sunset."
Lorde admits she is somewhat of a reluctant pop star.
"I'm a highly sensitive person. I'm not built for pop-star life. To have a public-facing existence is something I find really intense and is something I'm not good at. That natural charisma is not what I have. I have the brain in the jar."
