The mockingjay has arrived, and she’s sounding pretty killer.
Lorde shared the first song from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 on her Tumblr Monday to celebrate the first anniversary of her debut album, Pure Heroine, coming to the U.S. The preview track, “Yellow Flickered Beat,” gives a clue as to what the singer-songwriter has planned for Katniss Everdeen.
“It’s my first offering from what I hope will be a soundtrack you love,” Lorde wrote on her Tumblr. “It’s my attempt at getting inside her head, Katniss’.”
The 17-year-old songstress has actually been talking about the song for awhile, using Twitter to keep everybody on their toes about the track. Lorde started teasing “Yellow Flickered Beat” on Sept. 4, by tweeting the occasional lyric scrawled into random places, including on her own body.
— Lorde (@lordemusic) September 5, 2014
The track definitely hints at a new direction for the bow-wielding heroine. The first film’s soundtrack featured Taylor Swift with some folksy banjos singing “Safe & Sound,” and the second had Coldplay crooning “Atlas” over a soft piano. “Yellow Flickered Beat” picks up the pace and gives “the Girl On Fire” a chance to really burn, with lyrics like “the fire’s found a home in me” and “people talk to me, and all the voices just burn holes.”
Some of the lyrics were turned into a small poem, courtesy of fellow Hunger Games alumna Taylor Swift. It’s not surprising the Swift was the first person to get a glimpse of the preview track. Not only does she shares music credits for the film franchise—she’s also Lorde’s real-life BFF.
In July, the Lordes announced that she not only was going to be featured on the lead single for the latest in the Hunger Games franchise, but she was also picked to curate the entire soundtrack. Since then, she’s been getting the soundtrack ready before the film’s Nov. 21 release date, although there haven’t been any announcements over what artists will on the soundtrack, besides Lorde herself.
“I work from midnight until late on the soundtrack, singing into my computer, listening to demos and final mixes,” Lorde wrote. “We are almost at the end, the point where this soundtrack gets taken away from me and becomes something real.”
No word whether “Yellow Flickered Beat” is the lead single for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. The song is available to download on iTunes, and is also on Spotify.
thankyou so much for showing this song such a crazy amount of love today! this is so great ✨😍🎉☺️💜✨
— Lorde (@lordemusic) September 29, 2014
Photo via Liliane Callegari/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)