In April, Lorde launched her fourth album with a brief guerrilla gig in New York. A message telling fans to meet her at Washington Square Park – ostensibly for a video shoot – caused chaos, happily of the variety that gets filmed on multiple cameraphones and goes viral on social media. Thousands turned up and the police shut the event down, but those that evaded them were eventually rewarded by Lorde performing to new single What Was That with impressive gusto given that she was standing on a small wooden table at the time.
The artwork for Virgin.
It was surprising. Lorde’s last release, 2021’s Solar Power, wasn’t the only album of that period on which a female artist who had become famous in her teens strongly suggested that doing so was a living nightmare – Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever and Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts did, too – but it was the only one that sounded like a resignation letter, sent from a beach in Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s native New Zealand: “Won’t take a call if it’s the label or the radio,” she sang at one point. At another: “If you’re looking for a saviour, well that’s not me.” But Solar Power turned out to be merely an out-of-office message. Four years on and Lorde isn’t just back, but apparently back in the sharp-eyed party girl mode of 2017’s Melodrama. What Was That compares falling in love to the sensation of smoking while on MDMA. “It’s a beautiful life, so why play truant?” she shrugs on opener Hammer. “I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.”
The album features electronics that chatter, throb and regularly burst into fat, rave-y hands-in-the-air riffs, a high proportion of bangers to ballads and a profusion of big choruses. The ballads tend to the epic rather than introspective, with even Broken Glass, the track about the singer’s battle with an eating disorder, packing a hook you can imagine a stadium audience singing along to. In that sense, Virgin might seem like an act of consolidation – far closer to Melodrama, since hailed as a modern classic, than the understated and polarising Solar Power. But it seems infinitely more likely that Lorde has reappeared because she’s got something fresh to say rather than to reassert her commercial pop bona fides.
Despite the talk of pills, dancing and promiscuity, Virgin’s overall tone is markedly different. Melodrama was an album concerned with events that happen in your late teens, from experiments with drugs to first major heartbreak. Eight years on, Virgin is haunted by a late-20s kind of angst, born of the sense that you’re now incontrovertibly an adult, regardless of whether you feel like one, or whether you’re still, as GRWM puts it, “jumping from stone to stone in the riverbed … looking for a grown woman”. On Shapeshifter, a one-night stand brings ennui and an irrational fear that such behaviour is compulsive: “If I’m fine without it, why can’t I stop?”
Lorde: What Was That – video
There’s more heartbreak, but this time it’s sharpened by the sense that the sundered relationship was meant to be the relationship: the album ends with Lorde repeating the phrase “am I ever gonna love again?”, a sentiment that also lurks around Man of the Year, Current Affairs and What Was That. It’s worth noting that the fraught subject matter is invariably leavened with self-awareness and bursts of sharp wit. On Current Affairs, a romantic depiction of love blossoming under a lunar eclipse suddenly turns earthy: “You tasted my underwear / I knew we were fucked.”
Similarly, despite the choruses and the euphoric riffs, the sound of Virgin is noticeably unsettled and rough. The synths are distorted in a way that makes the resultant sound feel corroded; the more ambient textures tend to gust through the songs like drafts of icy air. The melody lines are regularly disrupted by bursts of incomprehensible, mangled vocals that suddenly appear then vanish. The biggest ballad, Man of the Year, builds to a climax that’s less uplifting than panic-inducing: the weirdly clipped-sounding drums feel too loud, punching through everything else in irregular staccato bursts; the aforementioned distortion soaks everything, including the vocals; the electronics take on a punishing, industrial cast.
Throughout, Lorde seems less like an artist cravenly rehashing former glories than one who began her career speaking directly to her fellow teens about stuff that mattered to them – and paving the way for Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo et al in the process – continuing to grow up alongside her fans. That’s always a tough job, but one Lorde seems more than capable of thanks to writing that remains as skilful and incisive as it did when she was precociously skewering pop’s obsession with unattainable lifestyles from an Auckland suburb in 2013. Powerful, moving, personal but universal – and packed with bangers – Virgin is the proof.
This week Alexis listened to
Westside Cowboy – Alright Alright Alright
A brief, frantic, bracing burst of chaotic, Pavement-ish alt-rock: feedback, guitar riffs that unravel into chaos, all over and done in just over 90 seconds.