Lorde is contemporary pop’s greatest demystifier, and also its greatest mystic. This contradiction has animated her music from the beginning. “We aren’t caught up in your love affair,” she declared in 2013’s “Royals,” taking a defiant stance against the world of pop-culture glamour—only to spend the rest of her début album making her own inverted version of that same world, an endless Vevo of the mind, populated by partying teen-agers “livin’ in ruins of a palace within my dreams.” On the album “Solar Power,” which was released in 2021, she set her sights on New Age wellness culture with the same mixture of distrust and sympathy, one moment making fun of an acquaintance for exchanging hard drugs for yoga, the next singing about her own powers of manifestation: “I can make anything real.” Although her lithe voice and melodic sensibility have set the agenda for much alternative-leaning pop music of the past decade and a half—practically creating the whole category—it is above all this ability to slip between enchantment and disenchantment, breaking down myths and replacing them with new ones, that sets Lorde apart.
On “Virgin,” her fourth and latest album, Lorde examines the myths that make up her identity. This introspection comes after a series of ordeals: the end of the singer’s longest relationship, an eating disorder, a period of artistic recalibration after releasing “Solar Power,” her first album that did not seismically shift the field of pop music. Lorde touched on some of this material in “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde,” the Charli XCX frenemy-reconciliation anthem she sang on in 2024, rattling off a fevered list of insecurities over a harsh, clanging beat. “Virgin” starts off somewhere stiller, after the metallic noise has subsided.
“I might have been born again / I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” she sings on the opening track, “Hammer,” before the song erupts into a distorted squelch, pulsing like a heat wave burning off mist. “Now we wake from a dream,” she intones on “What Was That,” a breakup song that deflates right when you expect it to swell, culminating in the title’s question, posed but never answered. These could be statements of triumph, but, in Lorde’s hands, they feel more ambiguous: the might-have-been renders her rebirth uncertain. The question of the dream’s content lingers, the foghorn hoot of a lone distant synth barely cutting through.
In a discography as slim as Lorde’s, it is easy to find patterns. You could say that “Pure Heroine” (2013) and “Solar Power” are life-style records: the former about the sleazy good-time visions of late aughts and early-twenty-tens pop, the latter about the singer’s ambivalence toward what she called at the time her “hippie housewife” life in California. “Melodrama,” her 2017 record, is more of a relationship album, and “Virgin” follows suit, in a way. The sharply observed songs spin through lost love, found lust, family trauma, gender exploration.
With “Virgin,” Lorde marks a determined return to New York—the city where, years earlier, she recorded much of “Melodrama” at the apartment of Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff, Dunham’s boyfriend and the album’s producer. In the lead-up to “Virgin,” Lorde held an impromptu concert at Washington Square Park, threw a live-streamed listening party at the tiny venue Baby’s All Right, and appeared courtside at a Knicks playoff game in royal blue; on the album, she name-checks Canal Street and recounts watching an eclipse in “the park.” She has spoken of the intervening years, and “Solar Power,” as a retreat: “Me sort of disappearing and being all wafty and on the beach, I was just, like, ‘Actually, I don’t think this is me.’ I just am this person who’s meant to make these bangers that fuck us all up.” When the album’s first single, “What Was That,” dropped, her fans eagerly predicted a return to form, connecting the track’s images—the memory of MDMA-fuelled nights with a lover, smoking the best cigarette of her life—to scenes from songs such as “Green Light,” in which she exhorts a reticent lover to remember “how we kissed when we danced on the light-up floor.”
“What Was That,” though, is not exactly a banger. Like most of the songs on the album, it’s more of a sly anti-banger, perpetually withholding the moment of fist-pumping catharsis. Where “Melodrama” paired confessional writing with Antonoff’s lush, extravagant production—piling synths and guitars on every song until introspection acquired the force of a 4-D movie—“Virgin” is thematically expansive yet sonically trim. Jim-E Stack, Lorde’s main collaborator on the record (and rumored new boyfriend), has been quietly shaping a new low-key sound for progressive pop over the past several years, lending hushed focus to releases by Bon Iver, Caroline Polachek, Gracie Abrams, and others. Here he strips away the washy reverb and neon keyboard glow of the Antonoff era and emphasizes hard, dry drums and spare synths that leave plenty of space for the vocals. It is a minimalist foil to A. G. Cook’s in-the-red sound on Charli’s “Brat,” though the two producers share an affinity for uncluttered arrangements and abrasive synth textures; at times, “Virgin” sounds a little like “Brat” heard from the next room over, or recalled on a groggy morning after. It is a fitting sound for an album about, among other things, the desire to return to zero, sloughing off excess and emerging clean.
Like all of Lorde’s music, “Virgin” is also about the relationship between the sensuous world of taste and touch and the realm of images, personas, façades. Although the title of the track “GRWM” is a nod to the popular “get ready with me” TikTok genre in which creators share their beauty routines, the song itself traces the more intimate process of transitioning from one self to another, a body stepping into and out of idealized versions of itself, like so many outfits. It contains some of her frankest writing about sex and its mundane aftermath: “Soap, washing him off my chest,” she sings, each syllable punctuated with a synth stab. The chorus repurposes the title’s acronym as a different kind of aspirational image, a judgment delivered to oneself in the mirror: “Girl’s a grown woman”—but also, later, “been looking for a grown woman” and then, in the outro, “I can’t find a grown woman.” There is no bitterness or cynicism in this progression, just a restless questing. Where the teen-age Lorde might have seized on this scene as a chance to decry a shallow, image-obsessed culture, here she simply takes inventory of herself—chipped tooth, the “pink galaxy” of acne—while looking forward. She was so much older then; she’s younger than that now.
Looking forward, glancing back, catching a glimpse of herself on a lover’s chain: “Virgin” is a hall of mirrors, each one offering a partial and possibly distorted view. Sometimes the mirror shows the body at its most abject, striving and suffering. “Mirror, mirror, on his shirt / I see a hot mess in an antique skirt,” Lorde drawls in her signature spoken-word voice on “Shapeshifter.” “Broken Glass,” the record’s most viscerally introspective song, goes further, addressing the singer’s past self in the throes of an eating disorder. At the highest reaches of her range, she gasps, “I want to punch the mirror / To make her see that this won’t last.” Other times, the mirror’s idealizing powers can be harnessed for good. On “Man of the Year,” Lorde visualizes the masculine body she realizes that she has been longing for. (In an interview, she described trying to become “the person who wanted to be singing that song on a stage in front of people,” then putting on jeans, a chain, and some strips of tape until “I looked at myself in the mirror and I was, like, ‘That’s me, that’s who I am.’ ”) In both cases, a single view refracts: there is mirror-self, the past self, the present one; the image dispelled and the image made flesh.
This multiplicity of perspectives is something Lorde has been working toward her whole career, from the uneasy “we” that dominated “Pure Heroine” and “Melodrama” ’s two mirror-image versions of “Liability” to “Solar Power” ’s “Big Star,” with its framing of intimate love as a celebrity-paparazzo relationship. The technique finds its fullest expression on “Shapeshifter,” the album’s best song—and also Lorde’s. Over muffled double-time drums, she lurches between the sensory present and the sphere of impossible ideals and harsh judgments, channelling the voices of others admonishing her for promiscuity, worrying that she is out of control—then fending them off with self-deluding words: “I’m not affected,” goes the song’s refrain, where the melody finally clicks into place, limning the edges of the anthemic banger that it never fully becomes. Lorde’s singing voice is often doubled throughout the album, but here the other voices occasionally peel off and sing over and against her, sometimes needling, sometimes supporting.
On “Shapeshifter,” all the fragments of myth that constitute her identity flash across the chorus in a pulsing, major-key progression: “I’ve been the ice, I’ve been the flame / I’ve been the prize, the ball, the chain.” It is equal parts Rimbaud—“I is another”—and Meredith Brooks—“I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a child, I’m a mother.” It is as if Lorde is listing these versions of herself to be released from their weight but also to keep living with them, bringing them under control. Purified and reclaimed, these guises can take their place next to the other parts of her ever-expanding self-myth. On her website, she sells a hat with text that reads:
