This was a nice surprise to see this morning (thanks to Michael Nanopoulos for the heads up). Two worlds that I did not expect to see meet, but which first met for me alone a decade ago.
When Lorde’s debut album, Pure Heroine, was released in September 2013, I had just moved back home to Hull after three years at university in Wales. I listened to it a lot, finding something so dissonant and captivating in its reflections on life in a nowhere town, its teenage dreams of glamorous escape. Songs like Tennis Courts and Royals are like incantations, manifesting a self-fulfilling prophecy, where fantasies of alienating oneself from humble beginnings become the fuel for stepping outside of one’s comfort zone. If the album had been released a few years earlier, I imagine I would have heard it very differently, so excited to leave Hull for new pastures, feeling like adolescence was finally over and life was truly about to begin. Instead, I listened to Pure Heroine whilst rediscovering streets I thought I’d never haunt again. It hit different.
Things were brought sharper into focus when, in late 2013, my mum suffered a psychotic breakdown. Newly paranoid and prone to violence, not wanting anyone to leave the house in case we never came back, she too fulfilled her own prophecy when I left home again in 2014. I never did go back to my childhood home, not because the door wasn’t open, but because I knew what lay behind it, and I could never put myself in that position ever again. Lorde’s debut was a surprising soundtrack to that shift in me — less defiant youth finding its own path, more traumatised escape seeking self-orphaning.
Before I made my jailbreak from the family home, Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of my Life was published in May 2014. I’d read an excerpt on The Quietus and had it pre-ordered. When it arrived, his ‘lost futures’ were felt acutely as haunted hallucinations; let’s-see-what-you-could-have-won bittersweet oscillations between hope and resentment. I remember trying to channel Fisher’s wisdom, his honest appraisals of the present, his mourning of the past, his hope for the future; his insistence that things can be different amidst a cultural landscape that insists they absolutely cannot.
It was a difficult thing to ponder at that time. What is this relationship between hope and resentment? How to affirm the former without being crushed by the latter? How to balance idealist dreams alongside informed appraisals of material conditions? Fisher’s pop-modernist purview was always a Gramscian “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” at once loving and seeking to exorcise the angel of history. How to read Fisher and listen to Lorde? How to reckon with reality and dream of entries into new worlds?
Fisher was the person I wanted to follow on my way out of the nightmare. First, I bounced between Hull and Cardiff for two years, trying to break free of family ties, before finally ending up in London in September 2016, thinking this was where I wanted to be, needed to be, if I wanted to escape from suffocating domestic traumas and build the life I wanted. I’d read Ghosts of my Life and Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun; inspired by their tandem visions, I wanted to study under both of them. When Mark died in January 2017, however, it tripped me into all that I’d sought to escape from. I’d elevated him in my mind to a last hope, and then discovered he had none left for himself. I’d primarily found Mark’s death so difficult to reckon with for that reason, but in hindsight, the experience was compounded by everything I was trying to run away from, which bit down hard on my heels after falling head first into a new kind of grief.
Later that same year, I saw Lorde perform at Alexandra Palace on the Melodrama tour. It was a deeply cathartic moment, and the world started to open out a bit again. Hope and horror were still in each other’s orbit — both in my life and on the Melodrama album especially — spinning faster and faster around each other than they ever had before. But that is why we sought out joy wherever we could find it. Joy was so precious because despair was so heavy. It has long remained so.
Fast-forward to 2025, I’m living through another nightmare, trying to maintain a relationship with my fiancé, who is currently being held in prison on remand. One of the earliest earworms they caught inside was Lorde’s song ‘Team’, head on National Prison Radio. “Livin’ in ruins of a palace within my dreams / And you know, we’re on each other’s team” — a sentiment shared out loud down the phone, caught between lost futures and a love that endures through an enforced pause placed upon a time we hoped to share. We are still on each other’s team. It’s the only way to survive this.
The prison system’s insertion into our lives, like some Kafkaesque entity that has kidnapped the person I love, makes our relationship feel as vital for survival as it is fragile to behold. A few weeks ago, a blue tit found its way inside my flat, and as I tried to catch it and set it free, my knees trembled to the point of collapse as I felt reality mirror my emotional turmoil. “Let me grab you tight enough to set you free, but gently enough that I do not crush you with care in the process.” That is how it feels to love someone in prison.
We have spent the last nine weeks writing each other love letters every few days, trying to keep this relationship watered and tended to. Every time I write, I worry that the love I feel and choose to share is messy, desperate and unbecoming. Then I read Lorde’s fan journal / newsletter and find a sentiment that has long fueled not just my love of blogging, but also a new approach to a relationship that I am holding onto for dear life:
Skittish of my own mess, I keep waiting for chapters to deliver themselves all sewn up with a neat ending before I tell them to you, even though I know by now the real story’s always open heart and you can’t tell it without blood gushing everywhere. Better to treat this like I do my journal, I think, scuzzy tangle of images transcribed from the whitewash, not the shore. I miss you too much.
I copy this down in a handwritten letter to my partner, and then a few days later, there’s Lorde, holding a book I wrote the introduction for just a few years ago, on the verge of another crisis (always another crisis); a book that has influenced me so much and which I have wrestled with repeatedly over the eleven years since it was first released.
It’s just an Instagram story post, I know… And everyone should read Mark Fisher! But the serendipity of it all gives me pause. I quietly approach a brief instance where I see the melding of two worlds, perhaps alien to some but oddly synonymous for me, in a Proustian manner, where an album and a book first encountered during a pivotal point in my life leave their indelible marks on memory, only to return now again, reminding me of lessons learned, not forgotten, but in need of new affirmation.
This was not the personal profundity I anticipated this morning when I woke up in my lover’s bed without them, turning unhealthily towards my phone to fill the space where they should be. Life is riddled with ghosts, with absent presences, present absences… Lorde’s Pure Heroine is one for me. I cannot listen to it because the emotions it brings to the surface are overwhelming. It is one of the ghosts of my life. I wonder what she’ll make of Fisher’s ode to the ghosts of his.
