SOLVED

Lorde Confesses to Running Secret Onion Rings Instagram Account

The 20-year-old pop star finally ended the internet’s ‘True Detective’ Season 3-worthy investigation into the mysterious onion ring appreciation Instagram.

Earlier this year, the heavenly songbird known as Adele admitted during a concert in Brisbane, Australia, that, after her management stripped her of her Twitter account because she tends to get too “mouthy,” she took it upon herself to create a fake Twitter so that she could “drunk tweet” with impunity.

Which brings us to Lorde. The New Zealand pop star, who The Daily Beast was one of the first to profile when she was 16, was suspected of operating a clandestine Instagram account dedicated to… her love of onion rings. Yes, the account was called “onionringsworldwide” and was unearthed by the New Zealand site Newshub, who noted how it was suspicious that the account was followed by Lorde and many of her inner circle, and the four posts of onion rings in various places around the world corresponded with the singer-songwriters’ whereabouts. When Newshub reached out to the 20-year-old formerly known as Ella Yelich-O’Connor about the account, it mysteriously disappeared.

So, on Thursday night’s edition of The Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon decided to probe the musician about the vanishing.

Lorde, emitting a deep sigh, confessed: “I have to explain first. 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,” she said, adding, “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,” she continued.

Fallon then pressed Lorde about why she decided to delete the account when it was discovered by the media and her legion of adoring fans. “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,” said Lorde. “It was fun for like five seconds, but I’m still going to, you know, keep eating onion rings. I think they’re underrated as well. I don’t think they get enough credit for how delicious they are.”

She then divulged “a few secrets” about onion rings. “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,” said Lorde.

Of course, the pop phenom has always enjoyed a bit of mystery. When she first arrived on the scene, there was only one photo available online of the singer, featuring her posing seated next to a dog, like royalty.

“It’s not so much a privacy thing as cleanliness,” she told The Daily Beast of her relative anonymity. “I like the idea of people Googling me and seeing this one picture that I want them to see. It’s definitely something I’ve cultivated over the years. I still like to have a little bit of control in this day and age when everything gets out of hand, and everything is on the internet.”

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Marlow Stern

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