Listen to 12-Year-Old Lorde Singing Kings of Leon’s ‘Use Somebody’ [VIDEOS]

It was only a little over a year when the world took notice of her, but Lorde, who is now 17, actually started in music several years past. An audio of the Zealand songstress singing Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody” in her pre-teens has been unearthed, and it was a near-perfect cover.

In the clip, 12-year-old Ella Yelich-O’Connor, Lorde’s real name, took on the hit song during an appearance at a local ration station in Auckland. With only a guitar to accompany her voice, the young songstress delivered an entrancing rendition of the oft-covered song.

“Well, it’s a privilege to hear a voice like that,” the DJ said at the end of her song.

The video, which has been online for a few weeks now, isn’t the first one to emerge from Lorde’s past. There have been a few videos on YouTube that were apparently taken when she was also just 12. A video of Lorde and her bandmates has been uploaded in November of 2013.

In the clip, Lorde, who was still sporting her signature curly locks, and the rest of the Belmont Intermediate School band “Extreme” were competing in the covers category of the International Schools Battle of the Bands 2009. They placed third. Even at a young age, Ella oozed confidence on stage, perhaps she looked even more confident than she does now. She was also more animated during the interview after their performance.

Lorde recently went back home for the New Zealand leg of her world tour. She kicked off in Christchurch on October 27, before she flew to Dunedin, Wellington and finally, in Auckland over the weekend.

She appears on the recent cover of Billboard magazine, wherein she revealed that she was pelted with a rotten fruit back in high school. Although she was never bullied as a student, there was an incident wherein someone threw a rotten pear at her during lunch, and it hit her “so hard in the stomach that it exploded everywhere.”

She didn’t cry over it, though, saying, “Look, you don’t have to do anything in high school to get a rotten pear thrown at you. It’s just what happens, and if you’re annoyed about it, you are silly.”