Ladyfag is talking to The FADER backstage at LadyLand with a unicorn horn affixed to her forehead.

The Real Housewife of Salt Lake City Meredith Marks is DJing nearby and all around one can hear the cackles of vodka-soaked members of the LGBT community gathering Under The K Bridge (literally under the Kosciuszko Bridge) in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a night of debauchery and pomp.

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The legendary NYC nightlife impresario is the force behind queer parties and scene pillars like Battle Hymn and LadyLand — her uproarious Pride weekend festival that’s been causing mayhem since 2018 and which has hosted such disparately iconic acts as SOPHIE, Christina Aguilera, Tinashe, FKA Twigs, and many, many more.

The idea for the massive fest came to Ladyfag when she realized there was no queer, alternative festival on Pride weekend in NYC — something a little more spicy than the corporate-backed parade, but a little more "pop" than any of the grimy warehouse shows populating Brooklyn. “For a few years, I kept being like, ‘Is there a reason there isn't one?,’” says Ladyfag of the imaginary sweet-spot-style fest. “In our little gay office, we used one of our many sayings: ‘Where there is a hole, fill it.’"

In 2026, LadyLand pared down from a two-day megafest to a one-day extravaganza featuring headliner Kim Petras, who previewed her performance as one of the few times she’d be performing her “debut” record, the critically lauded, Detour. (Petras sat down for a long chat about the project with The FADER in May). It was a full circle moment for both Ladyfag and Petras, given the fact that Petras played the very first LadyLand in 2018 and is now its top billed artist. “I want to create platforms for these kinds of artists to have those moments so that one day they can become big stars. I'm really proud of her,” says Ladyfag of Petras.

Read The FADER’s entire chat with Ladyfag below and learn about the magic that keeps the festival going and New York City night life so singular.

The FADER: I know you do parties all year. Where does LadyLand fit in your universe?
Ladyfag: I do parties all year and then this is our annual Pride extravaganza.

What was the seed of the idea for this festival in particular, when you first started organizing it?
For the youngins, they might not realize this, but in 2018, which was not that long ago, there actually wasn't really a queer music festival like this. I don't think we're the first, but there definitely was not really anything like a Coachella for gays, or something that really represented the queer community, and also somewhere where I wanted to go and party with my friends.

How did it end up at Under The K Bridge?
We didn't start the festival here. We did them for a few years somewhere else. When we did the first [LadyLand] here [in 2023], there wasn't any big festival here. We were the first big one. It was starting with a blank canvas, but we're obsessed with this venue. I was obsessed with the Junction 2 Festival in London, and I always see them under a [motorway bridge] — like our Brooklyn-Queen Express (BQE). And I live right beside the BQE, and I'd be like, "How the fuck does Junction 2 get to have this under an underpass and we can't do anything there?" So it was this amazing miracle, kismet, that I got to actually throw my festival here.

What is the secret ingredient to putting this massive festival together?
Being a little crazy. It's definitely not something that I recommend to everyone. There's maybe a reason not everybody wanted to do it. It's a lot of work, and it obviously pays off because it's so fabulous and I love doing it. But yeah, it's crazy.

What's standing out to you about LadyLand this year?
This year's pretty exciting for us because we started in 2018 there was this young artist, a little baby Kim Petras. Her agents were like, "Oh, we have this artist, [Kim Petras]." And I was like, "Oh my god, I love her. She's so fab. She's so LadyLand … this is exactly what I want." So she came up, she had a few songs in her back pocket, and it started to rain. And she got up there and she started singing "Heart to Break." And she put her mic in the audience, and everyone started singing, and she was just feeling it. And I looked at her, and I was like, "She's going to be a big fucking star."

And now, full circle moment for both of us: she came back here and is headlining LadyLand. I want to create platforms for these kinds of artists to have those moments so that one day they can become big stars. I'm really proud of her. I'm proud of all the artists [here tonight]. The past two months, I'm sitting in my office working on shit, trying to get everything ready, but so are all these artists. So they're all in their studios, practicing their dance moves, perfecting their crafts, and all these different people are all working on their parts to make it happen, and all coming together for one night. That's just the magic of a festival.

What allows New York City nightlife to continue thriving?
It's the fact that New Yorkers don't give up. Every year, I almost give up on Ladyland and then I get to the festival, and I hear everyone screaming, and I see everyone having the time of their life, and I'm just like, "Oh yeah, I can't wait till next year." That's part of being a New Yorker. We make shit happen. So, I'll see you next year.

On Friday, June 26, Lorde celebrated the one year birthday of her lauded 2025 comeback Virgin with a 49-track dump of the album’s demos — or as she called them “XRAYS" — alongside newly released photos and digital artifacts.

“Last year we played around with making an album worth of these skeleton versions, cool composites of a few different versions [of songs from 'Virgin’],” Lorde shared in a newsletter. “But on Sunday night, I realized the true X-rays of ‘Virgin’ would be realer, funnier, more revealing of crookedness and slant, less about where we ended up than celebratory of the way of traveling, the repetitions, the acne, the journey.”

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The final result is a series of files shared via the music technology platform [untitled]. The company’s co-founders Dan Lilienthal and Jose Chayet confirmed to The FADER that Lorde’s use of the platform for the major drop was “organic” and not a paid partnership. The company itself only learned about the pending drop a few days before it happened. The move by the newly independent New Zealand megastar, who only recently left Universal Music Group after 16 years, was an example of how independence can further allow major artists to share work with fans directly.

On XRAYS fans can hear songs bloom into the form the world first heard last June, when Virgin was officially released. For example, the project’s first “track” — “HOLDING A HAMMER 131123,” the beginning sketch of what would become the album’s incantatory intro, “Hammer” — features a never-before-heard brushed drum pattern and a cloying synth arpeggio. Lorde’s vocals are muttered, moving between gibberish and lines which either are the lyrics or close to the final track’s words. Over five versions that can be heard on XRAYS, the song solidifies into something closer to, but not quite, the final version, with its famous scraping and strange synth line and headline-making lyric: “Some days I'm a woman, some days I'm a man.”

Lorde’s move towards transparency and process mirrors other artists who have thrown it back to the file sharing days of Limewire to great cultural effect; Charli xcx famously shared her pandemic project, 2020s’ how I’m feeling now, with fans via Zoom as she was making it, asking them for feedback and insight. James Blake partnered with the subscription platform, VAULT, allowing fans could gain access to ideas, demos, and unreleased music for $5 a month.

Bringing fans behind the scenes into the most nitty gritty elements of one’s musical process is a way of furthering a sense of intimacy and connection in an era that is fueled on such fan-artist connection.

Some of music’s most major artists have deployed the strategy to chin-scratching effect, like Drake who flooded the digital zone during the peak of his Kendrick-led comeuppance with 100 gigabytes of unreleased music, studio sessions, and B-roll footage via his website. Taylor Swift too has added voice memo demos to the deluxe versions of her albums — prompting some to accuse her of using the add-ons as pretext to somewhat artificially boost sales and further cement her position in the charts.

For Lorde’s Virgin, there’s a synchronicity in this artistic openness, given the album’s X-Ray album cover and her lyrical approach to clear-eyed observation. This follow up to her dreamy and cheeky Solar Power has been about emotional and imagistic clarity. Like on “Broken Glass” where she speaks about her recovery from an eating disorder with striking candor, or on the epic “David” where she sings of existential agony plainspokenly: “Why do we run to the ones we do? / I don’t belong to anyone.”

These demos are an extension, and a practical version of, such transparency, and the fact that it was done out of a spirit of commemoration and artistic generosity makes the drop all the sweeter.