Lorde grows past girlhood, destroys womanhood and settles somewhere in between.
Lorde’s fourth studio album arrived with much fanfare. The lead single “What Was That” called back to Melodrama days, where confusion and heartbreak raged through anthemic indie-pop. All the anticipation built up to Virgin. Its cover art is an X-Ray of Lorde’s pelvis, tinted in light shades of blue. As the image suggests, the album excavates Lorde’s soul and lingers upon the same disorientation Lorde has become well-loved for. Yet, there is a sense of acceptance and accountability, a maturity that combines the lightness of Solar Power with the muddiness of Melodrama.
At 28, Lorde has been in the limelight for well over a decade (Pure Heroine came out in 2013). Being a crucial part of pop culture is a blessing and a curse—she can move mountains of culture, yet, is stuck in her own past. Virgin attempts to destroy her internal image to reshape the public narrative. On the first track “Hammer,” Lorde muses, “some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.” This pushback against biological essentialism, careening into a purer, less gendered physicality is perhaps the most fascinating theme on Virgin. Lorde explicitly names her own bodily functions (“don’t know if it’s love or ovulation”), then asks to be seen beyond them. Her physicality is something to play with, as she asks herself “do you have the stones” on “Shapeshifter,” she relinquishes corporal control to her partners on the same track. More an asker than an answerer, Lorde finds freedom in the ambiguity of her identity.
The idea of “girlhood” has permeated most of Lorde’s prior work. As the sun showed her “The Path” on Solar Power and she worked it out on the remix with Charli XCX on “Girl, so confusing,” the sense was that Lorde had become a “woman,” whatever that might mean. “Man of the Year” is skin-close to reality, from the sparse guitar to the dry, raw vocals. She questions who can love her at this point—where she is not yet formed but already too composed to fall apart—and ponders how she came to this: “I didn’t think he’d appear.” It is perhaps Lorde’s most naked song, along with “Clearblue,” an Imogen-Heap-esque acapella, vocoder ballad detailing how it feels to take a pregnancy test after having unprotected sex. The emptiness of the production allows the listening experience to feel tactile: sitting on the toilet by a white tub listening to the silence of the wind, waiting for a result but unsure which to hope for.
Virgin is thematically unlike any album on the Billboard 200, and for that it is worthy to be analyzed, dissected and questioned. Unlike her previous work, Lorde doesn’t expect any solutions to her queries. She floats, flows and forcibly moves herself around unstable concepts, letting mistakes carry their weight and imperfections reveal their beauty. While it is unlikely to become her most commercial or critically acclaimed album, Virgin closes the distance between listener and artist as much as possible, an experiment that doesn’t need to be well thought out, just experienced.
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