According to stereogum.com, on June 28, Lorde released her new album, Virgin and debuted every song live in a surprise Glastonbury set. The new album is getting great reviews but it has gotten some fans mad for a reason that has nothing to do with the music. Lorde is selling a number of physical variants of Virgin, including a “bathwater” vinyl edition and a CD that has been printed on clear plastic, to go along with Lorde’s ideas about “full transparency.”

The problem, as Digital Music News points out, is that the clear CDs apparently will not actually play in most of the CD players. Across social media, some Lorde fans are complaining that their copies of the Virgin CD will not play in lots of CD players, including cars and Discmans. Also, it is not just that you cannot tell whether it’s right-side up, some players apparently will not even accept the disc itself.

Lorde’s new album on a clear CD won’t play on a bunch of players pic.twitter.com/p5rdWu8RsE

— leevy skeevy (+2) (@casseroleboy) June 30, 2025

Unfortunately, the clear version is the only CD edition of Virgin right now and this would obviously be a bigger problem if it happened 20 years ago but some people still want to listen to the physical media that they bought. Now, Lorde obviously did not personally oversee the physical manufacturing of her album’s physical editions, so this is not her fault, but someone should definitely fix it.

Photo Credit: Nicole Ditt