Lorde confesses to onion ring reviewing hobby

Written by . Published: June 16 2017

Lorde has confessed she is the person behind an anonymous Instagram account featuring ratings of onion rings from around the world.


Editors at Newshub, a website based in the singer's native New Zealand, began investigating who was behind the account after receiving a tip-off from a fan that it might be Lorde.

They discovered that the account was followed by the 20-year-old pop superstar and her pals, and that some of the locations where onion rings had been rated with marks out of five matched up with her travel itinerary.

On Thursday (15Jun17) Lorde was asked by late night host Jimmy Fallon if she was the secret snack reviewer, and she confessed to being behind the account.

"I have to explain first," she revealed. "Here's the thing...I sort of naively didn't realize it would be a thing that I was going to different places and trying the onion rings at each of those places. I just... Ah! God, it's me! It's me.

"I feel like it reads like the kind of thing that a pop star would do to like look relatable, which it wasn't. It was a funny thing with my friends on the tour, and I was like... this is a good pastime."

After a Newshub reporter asked the Royals singer's management team if she was behind the account, it was deleted from Instagram.

Jimmy asked the star why the page had been deleted, and she replied that now her hobby was no longer a secret, it would feel inauthentic.

"I just felt like... now that everyone knows about it, it's like, it would feel like something I was doing to, like, create favor, and then I'm like, people are just going to be throwing onion rings at me on tour and I think it's gonna turn into a whole thing," she explained.

Lorde, real name Ella Yelich-O'Connor, will not be giving up eating onion rings however, as she finds them too delicious.

"It was fun for like five seconds, but I'm still going to, you know, keep eating onion rings," she says. "I think they're underrated as well. I don't think they get enough credit for how delicious they are."

Explaining what makes a good onion ring she adds, "From my semi-professional adventures, I think that a batter works better than a crumb. It's a bit lighter. And the other thing you can do to really make an onion ring magical is lightly pickle the onion before you batter it up. It takes on this acidity and it's incredible."

Lorde's new album Melodrama is released on Friday (16Jun17).