Virgin is an anxious and urgent return to form for Lorde
Last year, Lorde became a major character in Charli XCX's never-ending Brat summer. The New Zealander, born Ella Yelich O'Connor, featured on a remix of Girl, So Confusing, dropping an instant-classic verse that captured the complex feelings of modern womanhood and rivalry. It was the perfect teaser for the 28-year-old's fourth album, Virgin, which further explores some of those prickly emotions with brutal specificity – a sister to the zeitgeist-defining Brat.
Lorde has become an omnipresent figure in pop culture – she's spent her entire adult life, and some time before that, in the spotlight. The pop star rocketed to worldwide success over a decade ago when she was just a teenager with her 2013 album Pure Heroine, and has since evolved, chameleonic, through different phases of music and life.
In the lead-up to the release of Virgin, the singer made some notable public appearances. She debuted lead single What Was That at a pop-up event at a New York City park, shut down due to overcrowding, and made a surprise stop-in at a Lorde-themed club night in Sydney, ecstatically dancing alongside fans. These moments were like a fever dream, enshrining Lorde's almost mythological status: at once open and mysterious, relatable and untouchable.
It's a relief, after 2021's largely forgettable Solar Power, that Virgin feels like a return to form and a spiritual successor to 2017's excellent Melodrama – an anxious and urgent exorcism.
These songs don't shy away from being emotionally raw or sexually explicit. Lorde is candid about her mental health issues on the skittering Broken Glass, and addresses the long shadow of intergenerational trauma throughout the record ('There's broken blood in me, it passed through my mother from her mother down to me,' she confesses on the haunting Clearblue).
She's also frank about her evolving understanding of her own identity – 'Some days I'm a woman, some days I'm a man,' she sings on album opener Hammer; in the music video for Man of the Year, she binds her chest.
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