Lorde has carved out quite the niche in popular music – simultaneously a wise-beyond-her-years poet singing delicate lyrics and a hopelessly-romantic party girl performing pop anthems to sold-out arenas.
After her comeback feature on Charli XCX’s “Girl, so confusing” relaunched her into the top of pop, Lorde released her single, “What Was That” and immediately announced “Virgin.” Following years of relative dormancy, there was hope that Lorde would drop another Grammy-worthy album to serve as the new standard for a modern pop record.
But “Virgin” isn’t that. At first, Lorde’s hallmarks – introspective lyrics, interesting production and energetic hooks – seem to be as potent as ever, but further inspection does little more than leave the listener wanting something more. Lyrically, she tackles deeper subject matter, and sonically, she chases colder sounds, but neither endeavor results in a strong album.
“Virgin” opens with “Hammer,” one of the album’s singles and its best track. Lorde’s lyricism is as strong and evocative as ever. Her creativity is on full display, meaning that “Hammer” had potential to be the song of the summer, but muddled production and lackluster sound held it back.
Weak production is the primary pain point throughout “Virgin.” Lorde is known for her towering choruses and bridges, but swapping production titan Jack Antonoff, who defined her sound, for Jim-E Stack, who can’t amplify her energy, kills so much of what should make the album great.
Many of the new tracks, whether it’s “What Was That,” “Shapeshifter” or “Current Affairs” sound like the best songs off “Melodrama” – if they were heard across the street from a packed bar. The ingredients are there, and the pop should pop, but Stack can’t put it together to make the album click.
Despite sonic struggles, thematically, “Virgin” is Lorde’s most complex and introspective work, as she weaves two themes throughout: her gender identity and mother/daughter dynamics.
The first of the two is addressed in detail on the opening four tracks with lines like “Some days I’m a woman / Some days I’m a man” and “Now I’m broken open / Let’s hear it for the man of the year.” It’s rare for such a well-known figure to be openly exploring their gender identity, and Lorde writes about it so vividly that it’s engaging for any listener, cisgender or not.
Gender identity is so central to the album that it inspired the title, according to one of Lorde’s Instagram stories. The name “Virgin” isn’t about sex, it’s about purity being found in the androgyny between men and women. In a podcast interview with Jake Shane, Lorde elaborated that “Virgin” relates to anything pure or essential – not just chastity.
Further into the album, Lorde writes about her relationship with her mother and how that shapes her relationships and attitudes toward motherhood. “Favorite Daughter” begins this discussion, detailing how, through performance, Lorde chased her mother’s affection, but it fails to go deeper into that concept. “Current Affairs” describes Lorde needing her mother’s support after relationship struggles without giving more than an impression of what that conversation meant.
On “Clearblue” and “GRWM,” Lorde shifts the maternal theme from interpersonal to intrapersonal, beautifully singing about how she feels like “nobody’s daughter” and has “been looking for a grown woman” in her life, but Stack’s production again can’t elevate her fantastic performance, making the tracks come so close to working but ultimately not coming together.
The project’s final three songs, “Broken Glass,” “If She Could See Me Now” and “David,” aren’t as lyrically potent or evocative as the rest of the album. “Broken Glass” feels like it should have so much more energy, but weak bars sap the life out of the track, while “David” is as poetic as the album gets but doesn’t invite the listener in as well as it should.
With this mix of introspective pop, lyrical purpose and colder soundscape, Lorde seems to be as ahead of the curve as she’s ever been. “Pure Heroine” put a dying club banger genre out of its misery, “Melodrama” signaled the shift toward pop stars being introspective singer-songwriters and now “Virgin” seems to indicate that, after a year dominated by the sunshine of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, listeners might be ready for some moodier beats.
And yet, unlike “Pure Heroine” and “Melodrama,” “Virgin” doesn’t feel like an album that will stay at the top of a new pop culture, as muddled production holds back hit-or-miss lyricism. Lorde’s still got it, both in terms of her hook-crafting and her theme-developing, but another producer change may be in her future, as “Virgin” just misses the mark.
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