Lorde pens emotional note for her 20th birthday

Lorde at the Met Gala in 2016 (Getty)
Lorde at the Met Gala in 2016 (Getty)

It's Lorde's birthday here at home, but not quite in New York - where the singer is now, finishing her second album.

And on the eve of the end of her teenagehood, Ella Yelich-O'Connor has written a heartfelt, personal birthday note, in which she ponders her teenage years, gazes into adulthood, and hints at her forthcoming sophomore record.

"Tomorrow I turn 20, and it's all I've been able to think about for days," she writes.

"Can people see it, I wonder, that I'm about to cross over? On the subway I stare at boys I want to kiss and girls I want to hug. Do you see me?

"I was 16 when most of us met. Can you believe it? I laugh thinking about that me now - that glossy idiot god, princess of her childhood streets, handmade and ugly and sure of herself.

"All my life I've been obsessed with adolescence, drunk on it. Even when I was little, I knew that teenagers sparkled. I knew they knew something children didn't know, and adults ended up forgetting.

"Writing Pure Heroine was my way of enshrining our teenage glory, putting it up in lights forever so that part of me never dies, and this record - well, this one is about what comes next," she writes.

Lorde has said she has finished writing and is in the production stages of her follow-up to 2013's Pure Heroine, and she says in the note that she wants "nothing more" than to "spill my guts" about the new album.

"I just need to keep working a while longer to make it as good as it can be. You'll have to hold on. The big day is not tomorrow, or even next month realistically, but soon. I know you understand."

The Kiwi singer has been working with Pure Heroine producer Joel Little, as well as Fun. guitarist Jack Antonoff, who produced 'Out of the Woods' from Taylor Swift's 1989.

This year Lorde co-wrote the song 'Heartlines', which appeared on fellow Kiwi act Broods' sophomore album Conscious.

Newshub.