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Lorde is modern pop’s greatest debunker and its greatest mystic. It’s a contradiction that’s permeated her work from the start. “We’re not dependent on your love,” she declared on 2013’s Royals, taking a bold stance against the glamour of pop culture, and spent the rest of her debut album creating her own unique, upside-down version of that world, populated by teenage party girls “living in the ruins of the palace in my dreams.” On 2021’s Solar Power, she addressed new-age wellness culture with the same combination of disbelief and empathy, alternately mocking an acquaintance for swapping hard drugs for yoga and singing about her power of self-expression: “I can make it real.” While her flexible voice and melodic sensibility have set the tone for much of the alternative pop music of the last fifteen years, effectively creating an entire category, it's her ability to navigate between enchantment and disillusionment, shattering myths and replacing them with new ones, that sets Lorde apart.
On Virgin, her fourth and latest album, Lorde examines the myths that shape her identity. It’s a self-examination that comes from a series of trials: the end of her longest relationship, an eating disorder, a creative restructuring following Solar Power, her first album that didn’t make much of a difference in pop. Lorde touches on some of these themes on “Girl, So Confusing Featuring Lorde,” a reconciliation anthem with Charli XCX’s friend-foes that finds her delivering a feverish catalogue of insecurities over a jangly, jangly beat in 2024. “Virgin” begins more calmly, as the metal noise fades.
“Maybe I’ve been reborn / I’m ready to feel like I have no answers,” she sings on opener “Hammer,” before the song explodes into a distorted squelch that pulses like a heat wave burning away the fog. “Now we’re waking from a dream,” she singsongs on “What Was That,” a breakup song that fizzles out just when you expect it to, culminating in the title’s question, posed but left unanswered. It could be a statement of triumph, but in Lorde’s hands it feels more ambiguous: what might have been renders her rebirth uncertain. The question of the dream’s content remains, and the foghorn of a lonely, distant synth barely cuts through.
In a discography as modest as Lorde’s, it’s easy to spot patterns. You could say that 2013’s Pure Heroine and Solar Power are lifestyle albums: the former about the carefree good times she had in the pop music of the late aughts and early twenties, the latter about the singer’s conflicted relationship with what she then called her life as a “hippie housewife” in California. Melodrama, her 2017 album, was more of a relationship album, and Virgin, in some ways, follows suit. The edgy songs explore lost love, newfound passion, family trauma, and gender exploration.
With Virgin, Lorde marks a decisive return to New York City, the city where, a few years earlier, she recorded much of Melodrama in 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 in Washington Square Park, threw a live-streamed party at the tiny Baby’s All Right, and showed up to a Knicks playoff game in a royal-blue dress; on the album, she references Canal Street and recalls watching the eclipse in “the park.” She has spoken of the intervening years and Solar Power as a retreat: “I kind of disappeared, and I was all giddy, and on the beach I was like, ‘I don’t really think that’s me.’ I’m just the person who gets to make these hits that drive us all crazy.” When the album's first single, “What Was That,” was released, her fans eagerly predicted a return to form, linking the track's imagery—reminiscing about nights with her lover, high on MDMA, and smoking the best cigarette of her life—with scenes from songs like “Green Light,” in which she urges a silent lover to remember “how we kissed when we danced on a lit floor.”
What Was That, however, isn’t exactly a clever album. Like most of the songs on the album, it’s more of a sly anti-hit, constantly delaying the cathartic, fist-raising moment. Where Melodrama paired confessional lyrics with Antonoff’s lush, extravagant production—piling on synths and guitars on every song until the introspection became a powerful 4D flick—the album’s slick, slick, and slick production is a slick, slick, and slick album.
Sourse: newyorker.com
