Lorde mysteriously deletes all her Instagram posts other than these three

If there ever was a more dramatic thing to do in the 21st-century, it's purging everything from your social media account. It's like chopping off all your hair or changing your name – something that was just part of you that you've now decided to dissociate from. We've seen it from the likes of Taylor Swift and, more recently, from Blake Lively. It shocks fans to their very core and makes them question literally everything.

The latest culprit to have deleted (almost) everything from their social media profiles is New Zealand songstress Lorde. The 21-year-old has achieved cult fame in the last few years with hits like Royals and Green Light, and in the middle of touring at the moment, decided to delete everything from Instagram. Except for three posts. 

The three posts are of different things she's posted over the years, including one from 2016 of a neon sign reading "trust me", another from 2017 of an old photograph inside a cinema of people wearing what looks like 3D glasses, and finally, one of her onstage from April this year.

She turned off the commenting on the posts, and also deleted all but two old tweets on Twitter. It seems to have left fans distraught.

Lorde, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O'Connor, released her last album Melodrama in June of last year. Her debut album Pure Heroine, which featured her breakout hit Royals, came out in 2013. So it might seem too soon for her to be releasing yet another album after 2017's Melodrama. But fans sure have their fingers crossed...

One person speculated that she’s probably “getting ready for a creative process” for her third album, adding that the music industry doesn’t “show any mercy” and she wants to do things differently because “the long time between [Pure Heroine] and [Melodrama] wasn’t good for her”.

However, much to the surprise of fans who thought she'd disappeared off social media forever, Lorde herself chimed in to argue that wasn’t the case at all. “I think the time in between those records was very good for me – it allowed me to grow and learn and make a killer body of work, which is all I care about. To be clear, I have NO interest in the ‘mercy’ the industry may or may not show me. Isn’t about that, has never been about that.”

The "anti-pop princess" has still been active on Instagram, and some of the other comments she's left reveal that she just doesn't want to be posting "endless content". She reassured fans that she was "more than ok", and her decision to delete her posts was not to "recover or pull back" from fans. "It’s just what i feel is cleanest and most true to me as an artist & musician in 2018. will still be creeping on u all and commenting, just not going to be posting endless content. less is always more," she wrote on in a comment on someone else's Instagram post.

"No stress just pulling back the curtain again for a moment… she’s a baby writer in search of a legacy… will keep u posted," she reassured another.

She also revealed that she has "archived" her Instagram feed, meaning that if she wanted to recover the hundreds of posts that were there before, she could do it at the click of a button. In fact, that's what Blake Lively did after deleting everything to promote her upcoming film. If you check back now, you'll see that everything is back as it was.

But Lorde added that the purge wasn't a move in order to promote something. She felt she needed "cleanliness" in order to start on new artistic ventures in a more mysterious way so as to become an "enigma" like her heroes David Bowie and Prince.

"All archived, you’re right not promoting anything," she commented on someone else's post. "Just feel the need for cleanliness in my artistic practise, especially as [Melodrama] takes a final bow and new things start to simmer. I think about bowie, about prince– maybe in a way social media stands in the way of people becoming enigmas. Looove u all."

Well, thank goodness she'll still be "creeping" on us all, and we wish her a productive time while she works on the new stuff that's starting to "simmer"...