Lorde has long been carrying the weight of expectation. She was 16 when her topsy-turvy, subversively solemn single “Royals” became a runaway global hit in 2012, so different in its choppy structure and wayward melody from the EDM-inflected pop that dominated the charts at the time – and afterwards the success just kept coming. The teenager from New Zealand was touted as the next big thing in pop – not least because her nationality seemed to lend her music something exotic, mysterious and original.
Her debut album, Pure Heroine, was released the following year to critical acclaim; in 2018, her second album, Melodrama, became an instant classic. It was bold and brilliant, full of moody, introspective beats and poetic lyrics as she picked over a break-up.
She did almost all of this under pressure – but the popularity of Melodrama only increased it. Her third album, Solar Power, released in 2021, felt like an aberration: dreamy, vague and displaying an inconvenient level of happiness, it didn’t exactly give fans an opportunity to get into their feelings. A quiet anxiety has been palpable ever since: can Lorde ever live up to her early work?
Lorde’s fourth album, VirginHer fourth album, Virgin, shows that the answer is absolutely yes. This confessional, pulsating album is full of heart; thunder; the bittersweet. It’s pure electropop with the emotional excavation that made her simultaneously so relatable and unique.
We expect stars to trade on their personal lives, of course – but the personal revelations here feel deeper than the usual pop fodder. Even the cover shows this is more than a straightforward bare-all: where Solar Power was a blush-worthy photograph taken from underneath Lorde’s legs as she seemingly leapt for joy across a beach, Virgin goes a step further and shows an X-ray of her pelvis with an IUD inserted.
Sex and gender feature heavily on the record. Last month she told Rolling Stone that while she still identifies as a cisgender woman, some days she feels like a man (and repeats the idea plainly on opener “Hammer”, which was released as a single a few weeks after the interview). “Man of the Year”, a raw ballad, was written as Lorde processed “violent”, “jagged” feelings about her gender.
Lorde is an artist of extremes (Photo: Thistle Brown)As is Lorde’s wont, she veers between literal and mysterious. “Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation”, she sings on “Hammer” of the intense feelings she experienced after coming off her birth control pill; on “Clearblue”, an interlude track of a capella vocoder vocals, it’s as though she’s writing in a diary: “After the ecstasy / tested for pregnancy”. On “Man of the Year” she is more philosophical: “Can’t believe I’ve become someone else / someone more like myself”.
Though these tidbits will be the lifeblood of Virgin for fans, it’s all buoyed by a powerful musicality. We reach full euphoria within a minute of the album on “Hammer”, whose chorus lifts into pulsating synths along with Lorde’s ascending vocal.
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Similarly, the cryptic poetry (“I wear smoke like a wedding veil”) and on-the-nose confessions (“MDMA in the back garden / blow our pupils up”) of lead single “What Was That” are rhythmic and propulsive, with ethereal synths, expansive production and driving drum beats. Lorde is an artist of extremes: even her vocal lines are constantly jumping octaves from otherworldly falsetto to a husky whisper, embodying the binaries – male and female, inner and outer, private and public, pleasure and pain – that she is so drawn to.
Virgin is in some ways a complicated record. There are layers of meaning, big themes. But where she is cryptic and mysterious, Lorde carries us with music that does the explaining: a set of chords and crescendos that, like Virgin’s cover, permeate bone-deep. What Virgin will become is not yet clear. It’s malleable, with the potential to grow and morph as it’s digested by fans. One thing’s for sure, though: she seems to have shaken off that pressure.
Songs to stream: “Hammer”, “GRWM”
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