Lorde - Virgin Review
Four albums in, Lorde trades glow for grit and dives deeper than ever.
Virgin - the fourth studio album by New Zealand teenage alt-pop princess Lorde - drops on a hot, sticky Friday in midsummer. New York and London are undergoing heatwaves, while somewhere in a field in Somerset, Ella Yelich-O’Connor - known since 16 as Lorde - is onstage playing her latest record for the first time - an understated, androgynous figure dressed in white, thrashing a shock of black hair against hazy blue light. Like every sporadic Lorde release, when the time is right, it’s just right.
In 2021, the sun-soaked harmonies of Solar Power appeared to announce Lorde downing tools on a glittering pop career, kicking off when she was only a teenager and seeing her star rise quickly to huge commercial success. But Lorde is back from the beach, and with an unexpected departure from the self-assurance of the ‘Girl Who’s Seen it All’, pacing through the tunnels of the city in a crisp white shirt, taking a hammer to that image of peace.
When the first single was released this Spring - the catchy, clipped electro-pop track ‘What Was That’ - it briefly felt like Lorde’s new era might do little more than paste together various motifs of the now ubiquitous post-brat vernacular: MDMA! Ovulation! Cigarette! But the teaser track was only a glint on the surface of Virgin - an album that is moody, industrial, and charged with the 28-year old’s signature introspective power. Virgin sees Lorde wrestling with the shadows lurking in the underpasses of the city and the ‘chambers of her heart’.
From the outset, ‘Hammer’’s electronic thrum tells us that something has been unsettled, some silence broken. ‘Been to hell and back’, she reveals, but tells the listener to expect ‘a postcard from the edge’. A grittier graduation from the clean-cut sound of Melodrama (2017), Lorde has changed producers (swapping out Jack Antonoff for Jim E-Stack) but retained the ability to beam straight to the heart of the stories she’s untangling. In just thirty-four minutes, she paces through reflections on a damaging relationship, pregnancy, an eating disorder, and the experience of beginning to question her gender identity. There are moments that cut like a scalpel: she reflects on the damage wreaked by a previous relationship: ‘it made me a woman, being hurt like that’, and hints at a painful adolescence behind her precocious success : ‘breaking my back just to be your favourite daughter’.
But it takes quite careful attention to get to the emotional heart of Virgin. Her 11-track labyrinth of introspection does very nearly get lost in the reverb; in the discordant, repetitive sound that swills around it. At times it feels like she’s reaching for a halfway point between the electronic beat of her early work, and the fuzzy psych-pop of Solar Power. Tracks like ‘If She Could See Me Now’ and ‘Favourite Daughter’ are soaked in pain, but sound more like the breezy early Haim singles - some of which Jim E-Stack also produced - than something uniquely Lorde.
In all, the album starts stronger - with ‘Hammer’ and ‘Shapeshifter’ striking a sleek balance between a humming, metallic industrial sonic landscape and the raw vocals - at times delicate, at times powerfully embodied - that are so instantly recognisable. These tracks conjure an entwinement of the city and the body - it seems she is facing the fear she voices on ‘Clearblue’ to let the listener ‘into the whole machine’. But despite the prominent aesthetics of transparency - the X-Ray of her pelvis on the album cover; recurring motifs of mirrors and glass, Virgin remains a little murky.
Then again, Lorde is clear in the record’s opening track that she ‘doesn’t have the answers’. She’s navigating yet another shift in style, and the album remains open to playfulness - celebrating the album’s release on Instagram, she wrote that the slightly incongruous sample from Dexter Dapps’ ‘Morning Love’ on ‘Current Affairs’ is something she’s been waiting years to work with. There are moments where the ambitious blend that is Virgin doesn’t quite make sense, but it lands firmly and devastatingly back in her heartland with ‘David’, the stripped-back, emotionally raw vocals that won her so many devotees with tracks like ‘Liability’ and ‘Writer In The Dark’.
She’s already promised that there are some ‘really good B-sides’ - and if Lorde’s return to electronic sound is a little more impenetrable than Pure Heroine and Melodrama, it’s because she’s older, wiser, and has more complicated things to say. It may ask more questions than answers, but Virgin is a little quietly, a little muddily, Lorde’s most forceful album yet.