In a recent interview, a singer told me, “I don’t want to make an album, I want to create a work of art.” Under this very premise, and with an almost metronomic periodicity of four years, Lorde gifted us Pure Heroine (2013), Melodrama (2017), and Solar Power (2021). Now the time has come for Virgin, an album that seeks, through the transparency of Lorde’s voice (more crystalline than ever thanks to Jim‑E Stack’s production) and the rawness of synthesizers like never before in her career, to be reborn. To return to the origin. The virginity. The innocence. As she sings in the opening track Hammer, “I don’t have the answers.”
For the first time in her career, the focus of the album is not on the Kiwi’s lyrics, although that doesn’t stop it from including some of the best she’s ever written. Some highlights include, for example, the solemn opening of Clearblue: “After the ecstasy, testing for pregnancy, praying in MP3,” a merciful hymn of freedom; or the overwhelming finale, David, with lines as piercing as they are painful: “If I’d had virginity, I would have given that too / I made you god ‘cause it was all I knew how to do.”
Lorde had already addressed addiction (substance-based or not) in tracks like Dominoes or the masterful ballad Stoned at the Nail Salon from Solar Power, and earlier in Sober on Melodrama, but it had never been so present in her discography as it is now. She doesn’t hide because she knows that laying her deepest self bare in her music is both liberating and revealing of who we are, allowing her to conduct a study in Virgin that reflects her femininity as “raw, primordial, innocent, elegant, open, spiritual, and masculine.”
Electronics emerge as the protagonist of Virgin, marked by explosive outros that culminate each feeling. She already showed us this in the second single, Man of the Year, an intimate, sweet, and violent story where the artist lays her soul bare regardless of who loves her or stops loving her, reclaiming virginity as independence and exploding after the applause she receives as “man of the year” — an ever-growing chaos, much like a genre that is fluid in a society indifferent to pronouns.
Yet the outro that has captivated both fans and critics is that of Current Affairs, one of the tracks co-created with Fabiana Palladino alongside If She Could See Me Now. Here, the industrial density of the preceding song vanishes; there is no percussion or synthesizers, only a trailing reverb that creates an echo in which Lorde abandons vital instability to embrace the love that has arrived, which she presents as “hot and scared.”
The first four tracks of the album (and four singles from Virgin: Hammer, What Was That, Shapeshifter, Man of the Year) could perfectly function as an independent EP, which may explain the decision to remove River as the LP’s third song. Hammer kicks off with an ultrasound-like sound reminiscent of an echography, giving birth to a Lorde descended from her predecessors (the minimalism of Solar Power, the overflow of Melodrama), a daughter who can’t keep being a mother. A naive Lorde forced to mature, full of doubts (“don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation”) and some answers (“I jerk tears ‘cause they pay me to do it”).
Next comes What Was That, the first song of this new era that, within the album’s context, sheds the fear of being ‘Melodrama 2.0’ to become the backbone of an internal dialogue between artist and music – unresolved, yet made for dance – where she sings: “Since I was seventeen / I gave you everything / Now we wake from a dream / Well baby, what was that?” After finishing the promotion of Solar Power, Lorde believed there was no more music within her; now, presenting herself with full transparency, she transcends the superficial barrier to explore themes that range from the abyss of doubt to the reality of who we are.
Shapeshifter addresses the loss of innocence to become all the faces the world expects of you (“I’ve been the siren / I’ve been the saint / I’ve been the fruit that leaves a stain”) performing an act of resistance with the mantra “I’m not affected,” because those who label her haven’t read her soul, just attended the masses. The song opens with a raw dark-wave atmosphere to which Lorde adds vocal overdubs and subtle side-chains, building to a climax where every preconceived notion about the artist falls away until someone dares to truly discover her.
Favourite Daughter, the album’s most pop-oriented track and the hardest to write, produce, and record, opens the unreleased section of Virgin. It’s one of three occasions on the album where she addresses her mother, and the feeling is predatory: “All the medals I won for ya / Breakin’ my back just to be your favourite daughter.” It speaks to a culture of effort, never allowing oneself to disappoint, under the watchful gaze of the ‘brave’ angel who raised you. All of this is delivered with the catchiest chorus on the record.
The final three songs of Virgin – Broken Glass, If She Could See Me Now, David – represent Lorde’s greatest contributions to club music, pop-rock, and self-liberation in her career. If Green Light and Supercut were her easiest party anthems until now, Broken Glass complicates things with jumpscare-style kicks and marked pop percussion (a sort of continuation of the Girl, So Confusing remix) paired with brutally honest lyrics about her eating disorder: “I wanna punch the mirror / But what if it’s just broken glass?”
The most rock-infused Lorde to date begins If She Could See Me Now with dark tones and subtle guitars, looking back at her past self while “lifting weights to exercise my demons.” The chorus is one of Virgin’s most beautiful, abandoning cutting declarations in favour of an ethereal space where she embraces her inner child — a needed embrace to lead into the masterful yet raw finale, David.
If Solar Power opened with The Path, singing “If you are looking for a savior / Well that’s not me,” Virgin closes with “I made you god ‘cause it was all I knew how to do.” In one of her most vulnerable moments, to who many regard as her guardian angel, she would have given everything to have her own, including her virginity. The album concludes with the line “Tell it to them,” contradicting the closing of Pure Heroine, “let them talk.” Let them say whatever they want, because, as she makes clear in Shapeshifter, “I’m not affected.” Now it’s Lorde’s turn to speak — not the one we all knew, but the one she discovered when she allowed herself to see beyond. Full transparency.