New Zealand’s Lorde has released her fourth album, Virgin. Fans are rejoicing at the high-profile return of the singer, who recorded one of the best pop albums of the 2010s, Pure heroine. Though she’s been releasing records regularly all this time, the new work does feel like a comeback – just from a conceptual standpoint. It’s a delicate yet uncompromisingly frank album about female sexuality and the female body – without the usual pop culture objectification. Music critic Lev Gankin talks about how it is made.
A year ago my text about the album “Brat” Charli XCX began with a eulogy to the record performed by singer Lorde. That record, as you know, became the main sensation of the year and gave birth to “Brat summer” – a short-term but memorable pop-cultural phenomenon at the intersection of music, fashion, Internet trends and even political technologies. In 2025 it was Charlie’s turn to repay her friend – the creator of “Brat” proclaimed the imminent arrival of “Lorde summer” right from the stage of the Coachella festival in California. The catchphrase was eagerly picked up by respectable publications such as Billboard, Vogue and Hollywood Reporter.
At the center of Lorde’s potential “summer” is once again a music album: “Virgin,” the fourth full-length record from the New Zealand star who relocated to New York. Since 2013, when the singer’s acclaimed debut, “Pure Heroine,” was released, Lorde has been releasing new records strictly every four years. However, that hasn’t stopped her fans from flooding the comments section of Virgin reviews and song clips with exclamations like “she’s back!” in recent days. – as if it were not a release that fits perfectly into the singer’s routine of releasing new records, but rather a sudden, unpredictable comeback.
There’s some common sense in these reactions, however – and not just fan exaltation. Lorde’s previous album, Solar Power (2021), released at the end of the coronavirus pandemic, disappointed many admirers of her talent with its somewhat inert nature. Having made a name for herself on energetic, danceable pop hits and on the unusually precise, witty observations about herself and her life in the lyrics of those hits, in “Solar Power” the artist, following the quarantined world around her, seems to have decided to ground herself, to stop the nervous running of time – and remained largely misunderstood. In this context, “Virgin” is indeed a comeback, at least on a conceptual level. It’s an upbeat, inspired album in which Lord once again does what he does best: pure-hearted self-reflection, completely devoid of falsity and posturing.
After the release of “Pure Heroine” there was much talk about how brightly that record stood out against the background of the chart bestsellers of its day with the maximalist production of Max Martin and the chicks of his nest. Lorde’s (and New Zealand producer Joel Little’s) frugal solutions did sound fresh – but, if anything, The xx had successfully demonstrated the viability of a similar approach a few years earlier.
The true innovation of “Pure Heroine” lay in the peculiarities of storytelling – in the way the protagonist, who was under 17 at the time of the record’s release, described her own experience of interacting with the world. “Don’t you think people are awfully boring to talk to?” – Lorde asks her invisible interlocutor in the very first line of the album. It’s hard to imagine a more apt depiction of the ubiquitous ennui – the characteristic teenage splenium later visibly brought to the screen in Pixar’s “Puzzle”.
That is, strictly speaking, the album “Pure Heroine” was a performance in the genre of “tin-pop” familiar to the world show business – only not in the form fabricated by the industry, but from the author’s controlling position. In this context, Lorde’s debut paved the way for, say, Billie Eilish’s first album – and not just for him.
But then she, like all other early debut performers, had to solve a truly non-trivial task: to grow up together with her own audience, to maintain the space of collective identification she had built in a rapidly changing environment.
This is what Lorde tackled on her second LP, Melodrama (2017) – and continues to do on Virgin. While Pure Heroine captured the teenage experience and Melodrama the world through the eyes of a twenty-something girl, Virgin is a glimpse into the perception of reality in her early thirties. As usual, Lorde doesn’t take long at all, in the first verse of album opener “Hammer” she sings: “Is it love or just ovulation?”. The theme of female reproductive health is an important leitmotif of the record. One of its most impressive cuts, the a cappella vocoder sketch “Clearblue,” is titled after the name of the Swiss brand’s pregnancy test.
Motherhood interests Lorde not only in terms of her own potential future – in “Favorite Daughter” and “GRWM” the singer touches on her relationship with her mother, the dynamics of which, of course, also change over the years. And also in terms of the bodily processes it triggers. It seems that the main plot of “Virgin” is exactly that: the study (and, in the limit, acceptance) of one’s own body, with its promises and possibilities, with its impulses and reactions, with its oddities and flaws. From a certain angle, the album’s track list begins to resemble an anatomy lesson in which Lorde herself is both the student of the course and the prototype: “Hammer” mentions the neck, “What Was That” mentions the pupils, “Shapeshifter” mentions the throat, “Man of the Year” mentions the shoulders, “Favorite Daughter” mentions the back, and so on with all or almost all the stops.
The female body, of course, was always the object of unrelenting pop interest, but its subjects were usually left to other people – and male ones at that. So the interest itself was mostly exploitative, unlike the situation with the Virgin album.
The videos for the songs from the record (“Hammer”, “Man of the Year”) feature an abundance of nudity and semi-nudity, but their demonstration is completely devoid of the evaluative male lens. And in “Shapeshifter,” Lorde quotes the title of British artist Tracey Emin’s famous installation “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With.” Created in 1995, the work is a tent with the names of a hundred-plus people with whom Emin has shared a bed in her life. Despite the detailed list of names, the main character of the project, of course, remained the artist herself – and her, as Lorde puts it, “ruthless femininity”.
The fixation on the bodily sphere predetermined many of the visual, sonic and poetic decisions of the Virgin album. The cover of the release features a pelvic x-ray, where not only the zipper from her jeans, but also her IUD is clearly visible. This image, on the one hand, directly hints at one of the through themes of the record, and on the other hand, sets a rather remarkable level of frankness. However, those who are familiar with Lorde’s work are unlikely to be shocked by this picture or the close-up of her pubes on the inside of the envelope – the singer has always been characterized by a bribing directness of her statements.
In the new album she also formulates her thoughts simply and straightforwardly, without hiding behind metaphors and circumlocutions. “Man of the Year” is a song about realizing your own gender fluidity, “Broken Glass” is about dealing with eating disorders, and “Clearblue” is about unprotected sex and the need to take a pregnancy test.
The sound of the Virgin album is matched to this setting. Lorde’s vocals are traditionally brought to the forefront of the mix – even (and especially) where she doesn’t raise her voice. At one time, critics defined the artist’s records as whisper-pop: from the verb to whisper. The term rather failed to catch on, but the manner it describes has literally taken over the mainstream with the help of Lorde and a few like-minded women: Billie Eilish is the first to come to mind here too, but she’s not the only one – singers ranging from Selena Gomez to Taylor Swift have at various times resorted to similar solutions. On the one hand, it allows to keep the trusting intonation of spoken language, not to turn the performance of each song into an operatic aria – spectacular, but obviously demonstrative. On the other hand, the vocals are not lost against the background of the arrangement: Lorde has no reason to hide behind the production, she has something to say.
In the case of “Virgin”, the production itself fits into the dance-pop formula of her earlier album “Melodrama”. Given the corporeal, even physiological nature of Lorde’s fresh songs, it’s obvious that they needed a suitably dynamic musical accompaniment – no wonder that the rhythmic decisions of most of the tracks evoke an immediate motor response. One of the synthesizer timbres used on the record was described by the singer as “dumb” in an extremely complimentary way: Lorde strove for functionality rather than sophistication on Virgin.
In my opinion, the songs that she succeeded the brightest were those with a clearly discernible dynamic arch, such as “Shapeshifter,” with its creeping beginning and inexorable build-up of texture, or the closing “David,” where, at a dramaturgically justified moment (on the line “I donʼt belong to anyone”), a deafening industrial screech suddenly emerges from beneath the sensual ballad.
It’s understandable: all of the themes Lorde raises in “Virgin” have significance primarily against the backdrop of her life’s journey – and she’s well aware of that, scattering flashbacks from the past throughout the record, right down to the phrase “pure heroine” that reappears in the lyrics of “David”. When we study our bodies, we compare them to how they once were; when we react to impulses, our nerve endings check them against impulses experienced before. That’s why the best songs in Lorde’s album are those that have an inner development, that embody on a musical level the energy of change, maturation, reincarnation that interests her at this stage.
In the end, we won’t live Lorde summer in and of itself – but in the context of Brat summer and all the other years in our lives. It’s too early to say what it will turn out to be – but Lorde has kept her end of the bargain.
