Virgin
The cover art for *Virgin*—an X-ray of a pelvis with a visible IUD—was a far cry from that of Lorde’s bright, beachy third album, 2021’s *Solar Power*, whose sun-soaked, jasmine-scented songs drew from Laurel Canyon folk and Y2K soft rock. Looking back, that album’s free-spirited imagery was a bit idealistic—a projection of how the New Zealand native turned New Yorker wished she could be. Her fourth album, as she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, is a portrait of the 28-year-old singer as she is, without edits or apologies: “Kind of like a photo of yourself that you don’t love, but captures something true about you.” The resulting songs, written between 2023 and 2025, are forthcoming and visceral, trading *Solar Power*’s New Age-chill for beats you can feel in your gut. (It’s her first album since her 2013 debut not co-written and -produced by Jack Antonoff; instead, she shared production duties with the LA-based electronic musician Jim-E Stack.) Surrealist introspection gives way to throbbing bass on opening track “Hammer,” where a walk down Canal Street ripples with psychedelic visions. “I had just come off my birth control, and I could not believe how I was feeling,” Lorde told Lowe about the song’s inception. “Everything was pure possibility. That first sound feels like it’s coming from a very guttural place in the body. My sister said, ‘It sounds like it’s coming from your womb.’” Cue the aura readings, 3 am cigarettes, broken mirrors, pregnancy tests, ego death. On “Man of the Year” and “Favourite Daughter,” questions beget more questions on the subject of what it means to be a woman, and moreover, a woman who’s now been famous for nearly half her life. The latter is at once a love letter to her mother and a meditation on being a teenager thrust into global pop stardom. “There’s been this dynamic for the last 10 to 12 years—and then further back—of wanting so badly to be loved, and to get this approval, and to be the favorite,” she told Lowe. “And it was really moving to me how, even as I was singing this song about my foremost idol and the person who I think is the most amazing in the world, I was also singing about what a crazy thing it is to have happened to you, what happened to me at 16.” Now the superstar finds freedom in the freefall: “I’ve been up on the pedestal/But tonight I just want to fall,” she sings on the shuffling “Shapeshifter.” “I still don’t know what happens when you put out a record that is like this,” she admitted about the unfiltered portrait *Virgin* presents. But in its full transparency, she arrives at something like peace.
Lorde’s fourth album returns to the digital, physical sound of Melodrama. While rooted somewhat in her past, it’s a gritty, tender, and often transcendent ode to freedom and transformation.
New Zealand superstar Lorde chips away to reveal her purest self on her exploratory fourth album, 'Virgin'
On the uncomfortable paths of Lorde's fourth album, 'Virgin,' slam-dunk bangers are substituted with reinvention and restraint surrendered through hushed, reflective, and carnal synth-pop vestiges.
New Zealand artist channels her signature bluntness into songs about rebirth and reconnection
Lorde may not break entirely new ground on fourth album Virgin, but its warmth and texture make it consistently compelling and quietly brilliant.
Following a four year hiatus, garnering palpable anticipation for her return, Lorde sheds the tanned skin of her ‘Solar Power’ era and embraces her
Though it lacks the immediacy of Lorde’s best work, ‘Virgin’ is a hesitant step in the right direction for the singer.
Maturity requires sacrifice, which, throughout her fourth album, Lorde discovers by separating herself from the person the world sees and often expects.
Virgin by Lorde album review by Sam Franzini for Northern Transmissions. The singer/songwriter's new LP is out today via Republic Records
After her last album embraced switching off, the musician returns to pop’s fray to revel in the mess of late-20s angst with a strikingly unsettled sound
Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s fourth album is a brooding blockbuster as visceral and emotionally gory as Solar Power was darkly becalmed