Days before Lorde released her fourth album, Virgin, the pop superstar stood in the middle of Brooklyn club Baby’s All Right basked under a cerulean-blue glow as she shared song snippets from her new project and danced with fans. Dressed in a white, nearly see-through dress with glitter on her face, Lorde threw her hands up toward the venue’s disco ball and looked like an ethereal reincarnation of herself. With Virgin, Lorde excavates parts of herself she has yet to contend with on the public stage — from her evolving gender identity to her family-born traumas. The result is nearly 40 minutes of undeniable pop bangers and jagged synth flashes where Lorde wipes parts of her past clean and makes room for the adult she has crystallized into.
It’s a departure for the musician who has chosen to retreat out of the spotlight after each album cycle, an act that has created a somewhat purposeful, somewhat accidental pattern of waiting four years between releases. The last time we heard from Lorde, on 2021’s laid-back, folk-toned Solar Power, she’d chucked her cellphone into the waters of her native New Zealand and naively swore she was a girl who had seen it all. That album wasn’t as impactful (perhaps by design) as her first two commercially successful and critically-acclaimed LPs, 2013’s Pure Heroine and 2017’s Melodrama. Since then, fans have clamored for Lorde to return to the swooping, alternative synth-pop that defined her early career, which means the stakes are particularly high for Virgin.
She has answered the call with an album that isn’t trying to capture something from the past, but instead leans into the chaos of reinvention. It’s the sound of an artist — one who recently came out of her longest relationship — learning to be OK with the uncertainty of solitude. “I might have been born again, I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” she sings on the mystically swirling opening track, “Hammer.” She’s finally owning up to the fact that, despite her claims to the contrary on Solar Power, she’s never had it figured out. Having arrived at that awareness, she taps into a whole new kind of emotional upheaval that goes well beyond even the most intense moments on Melodrama.
Much like its album cover, which features a cloudy blue X-ray image of Lorde’s own pelvis (including her IUD), Virgin is a raw portrait of not only Lorde the artist, but also Ella Yelich O’Connor, the 28 year-old woman behind the mic. Throughout her discography, Lorde has made references to her mother — on Melodrama’s “Writer in the Dark” and Solar Power’s “Oceanic Feeling.” But on Virgin, she goes bone-deep and tackles her generational trauma across several tracks. On the supercharged album highlight “Favourite Daughter,” she owns up to her people-pleasing tendencies and ties the compulsion back to her own mother-daughter relationship. “Cause I’m an actress, all of the medals I won for ya/Panic attack just to be your favorite daughter,” the singer confesses over a clapping beat and pirouetting melody that lifts higher and higher with each note.
On the jolting “GRWM,” which unexpectedly means “grown woman” rather than the popular online acronym for “get ready with me,” Lorde carries her “mama’s trauma” in her wide hips and finally realizes just who she wants to be: “A grown woman in a baby tee.” The twinkling Wurlitzer echoes Solar Power’s “Secrets from a Girl,” but gone is any girlish bravado. Even on a song about a new fling, like “Current Affairs,” Lorde turns to her mother as a map for how to be a brave woman in a messy relationship.
Virgin’s rawest moment is “Clearblue,” a song appropriately named after the popular drugstore pregnancy test, as Lorde contends with both unprotected sex and the daunting reality of holding her family’s trauma deep in her DNA. The track is fittingly visceral, with Lorde’s voice layered, warped, and distorted to jarring effect, making for the kind of musical catharsis that’s designed to double you over on the first listen. “There’s broken blood in me, it passed to my mother from her mother down to me,” Lorde sings without any backing instrumentation, suspending us in the stillness of her honesty.
From Melodrama’s “Writer in the Dark” to Pure Heroine’s “Still Sane,” identity has always been a common theme in Lorde’s music. But like everything else on Virgin, the explorations here are much more vulnerable than what she’s previously offered. She broadens the scope of her gender on the climactic “Man of the Year” and reflects on all the different partners she embodies in romantic relationships with “Shapeshifter,” admitting on the dreamy track, “I’ve been the prize, the ball and chain.”
By the sound of its thumping bass and electro-pop synths, “Broken Glass” could turn into a big anthem in the vein of “Green Light” — in fact, it chronicles Lorde’s struggles with an eating disorder. Against the song’s bombastic production, Lorde details the ghastly side of starvation, including rotten teeth and shattered mirrors. “I hate to admit just how much I paid for it,” she confesses in the first verse. The song’s sonic direction is an interesting choice for Lorde, who often opts for intimate acoustic instrumentation when getting at especially tough subjects, as on 2017’s “Liability.” But no matter the depths Virgin explores lyrically, the propulsive rhythms and uplifting synths could easily get play time in a moody club. It’s one of several high points here that might bring to mind the mirrorball vulnerability of “Dancing on My Own,” by one-time Lorde collaborator Robyn.
In some ways, the album sees Lorde return to the steely, electronic world of dance-forward synth-pop she explored on Melodrama, but the production on Virgin is much more sparse than her sophomore effort. There’s no party to emulate here (either to enjoy or escape from), it’s just Lorde’s signature lower register delivering truth bombs, one after another.
When Lorde isn’t writing about tough topics like family dynamics or her body image, she is revealing in other ways, offering elemental, carnal songs about love and desire. On “Current Affairs,” she builds upon the suggestive imagery of being naked in bed from previous songs like Melodrama’s “The Louvre” with something much more straightforward. “You spit in my mouth like you’re saying a prayer,” Lorde sings, her angelic voice making the act sound holy. Amid the ragged candor of “Clearblue,” the singer paints a vivid image: “My hips moving faster, I rode you until I cried,” she offers, almost wailing as her voice breaks.
By the end of Virgin, Lorde is confident that she is embodying a newfound strength. She lifts her exes’ body weight at the gym on the convulsive “If She Could See Me Now,” and delivers sharp incisive lines directly to said ex on the cinematic closing track, “David.” After all the excavation and ecstasy, Lorde becomes unleashed and fully free — one step closer to the person she wants to be.