Virgin is an anxious and urgent return to form for Lorde

4 days ago 8

the New Zealand star gets emotionally raw and sexually frank on her new album.

Lorde, Virgin

Last year, Lorde became a major character in Charli XCX’s never-ending Brat summer. The New Zealander, born Ella Yelich O’Connor, featured on a remix of Girl, So Confusing, dropping an instant-classic verse that captured the complex feelings of modern womanhood and rivalry. It was the perfect teaser for the 28-year-old’s fourth album, Virgin, which further explores some of those prickly emotions with brutal specificity – a sister to the zeitgeist-defining Brat.

Lorde has become an omnipresent figure in pop culture – she’s spent her entire adult life, and some time before that, in the spotlight. The pop star rocketed to worldwide success over a decade ago when she was just a teenager with her 2013 album Pure Heroine, and has since evolved, chameleonic, through different phases of music and life.

In the lead-up to the release of Virgin, the singer made some notable public appearances. She debuted lead single What Was That at a pop-up event at a New York City park, shut down due to overcrowding, and made a surprise stop-in at a Lorde-themed club night in Sydney, ecstatically dancing alongside fans. These moments were like a fever dream, enshrining Lorde’s almost mythological status: at once open and mysterious, relatable and untouchable.

It’s a relief, after 2021’s largely forgettable Solar Power, that Virgin feels like a return to form and a spiritual successor to 2017’s excellent Melodrama – an anxious and urgent exorcism.

Lorde performed songs from Virgin on day three of Glastonbury on the weekend.

These songs don’t shy away from being emotionally raw or sexually explicit. Lorde is candid about her mental health issues on the skittering Broken Glass, and addresses the long shadow of intergenerational trauma throughout the record (“There’s broken blood in me, it passed through my mother from her mother down to me,” she confesses on the haunting Clearblue).

She’s also frank about her evolving understanding of her own identity – “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” she sings on album opener Hammer; in the music video for Man of the Year, she binds her chest.

There are lashings of humour, too: “Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation”, from Hammer, might take the cake for my favourite one-liner of the year so far, belying the song’s serious subject of hormonal whiplash after coming off birth control.

It’s all a far cry from the girl who sang about forgoing worldly pleasures on 2013’s breakout single Royals, but there’s always a loving hand extended to her younger self, too; Lorde even name-drops her debut album on closer, David.

Musically, there is both familiar and new ground here. The singer has parted ways with long-time producer Jack Antonoff and enlisted Bon Iver collaborator Jim-E Stack; one track features Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on guitar and bass, and several others see Blood Orange’s Devonte Hynes contribute instrumentals. English pop singer-songwriter Fabiana Palladino has writing credits on two tracks, including the confessional Current Affairs, which includes a sample of Jamaican rapper Dexta Daps’ explicit Morning Love. These diverse influences all have an audible impact on Virgin’s sound.

Some moments don’t quite stick the landing: the speak-singing on Shapeshifter is awkward; Man of the Year recalls Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever, as What Was That is an eerie echo of Lorde’s own Green Light. But there are also small, subtle touches that add magic – intermittently bleeping synthesisers lift GRWM to another level, and addictively busy keys keep album highlight Favourite Daughter moving. All the while, Lorde’s voice maintains its bruising power.

Clocking in at just over half an hour, Virgin is a slim but impactful album – a mighty comeback for one of pop’s best and brightest. “2009 me would be so impressed,” Lorde sings on GRWM. She should be.

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