Album Review: Lorde, Virgin

On ‘Hammer’, the opener to her fourth album, Lorde affirms: “I might have been born again, I'm ready to feel like I don't have thе answers”.

It’s a lustral decree about growing up that takes a note from Dylan’s back pages (“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”), an internal dialogue between what Lorde once accepted and now doubts. This hard-earned journey from experience to innocence runs the gamut of Virgin, the plugged-in successor to the offline yearning of 2021’s Solar Power.

When Lorde released the lead single, ‘What Was That’, it seemed that Virgin could signal a return to form, taking spirited electropop cues from her second album Melodrama. While the track sounds like an heir apparent to ‘Green Light’, expectant listeners may feel a bit wrong-footed. Virgin is a far more mellow drama than what came before — and for good reason.

The singer was 17 when she started writing Melodrama, and the ostentatiousness of being a teenager strikes home with the album’s penchant for pedalling cathartic anthems. Melodrama demanded sonic grandiosity. But Virgin is different with its more stripped-back, minimal fare.

This isn’t to say the new album lacks spectacle or tries to do away with Lorde’s branded appetite for avant bangers. No. Virgin is primal, untamed, physical and full of Lorde’s most forcible vocals yet; and, in true Lorde fashion, it sounds unsurprisingly incredible. From the sugary late-night gallop of ‘If She Could See Me Now’ to the singer’s synthy shards of ‘Broken Glass’, Lorde’s fourth LP makes a case for “Album of the Summer” that’s tough to beat.

But Virgin goes deeper than that. Much of the album centres on the singer’s tumultuous relationship with her body, as she recovers from an eating disorder and embraces an evolving gender identity. “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” she sings on ‘Hammer’. The album art – which features an X-ray of her pelvis, IUD and all – casts Virgin as a look at her interior in the frankest terms.

On ‘Man Of The Year’, Lorde glides across a lightly fingerpicked hum fresh from a “recent ego death” as she pines outwardly for someone to “love me like this”, before the instrumental descends into a cinematic fantasia.

Meanwhile on the existentially horny ‘Clearblue’, the singer contemplates birth lottery doom and cuts her losses: “There’s broken blood in me. It passed through my mother from her mother, down to me”. Over an Imogen Heap-incarnate din, she beckons emotional release through small death, crying out, “How’s it feel being this alive?”.

Then, Virgin closer ‘David’ sees Lorde admit her lack of answers and implore, “Am I ever gonna love again?”— a line which brings the entire album full circle.

Across these 11 tracks, the singer situates the body as a site of desire and suffering, carrying the emotional imprints of the past headlong into the present. Lorde may not have the answers, but she’s feeling her way through it. Locating herself in the tactile, she staunchly confesses on ‘Clearblue’: “I’m free”.

And when she says it, you can’t help but believe her.

8.5/10

Out now