Your Favorite Pop Star's Favorite Pop Star Is Back
Every music career, like every life, involves a series of masks. Artists like Madonna (Ciccone) and David Bowie (Jones) each reinvigorated pop by making the mask itself their subject. Which is, by the way, also what I'd argue Sabrina Carpenter's current much-gasped-over album cover is up to. By contrast, the cover of the latest album by New Zealand's Ella Yelich-O'Connor, better known as Lorde, seems to take to the limit today's demand, from fans conditioned by social media, that artists offer up as much self-exposing authenticity as they possibly can. It's an X-ray of the 28-year-old artist's own pelvis, complete with visible IUD. On the inner-sleeve art, matters get more intimate still , to the internet's sometimes-mock-and-sometimes-actually-prudish shock.
But this transparency can be its own kind of disguise. In seeming to lay herself bare, in those images as in the lyrics of these songs, Lorde demonstrates that behind every reveal lies another mystery: This is a woman's vagina—or could it be a man's? If I offer myself to you, what if that's just a more effective way of withholding? Am I confessing secrets, or constructing rationales?
It's often when an artist moves into a new phase that the previous one is revealed as the mask it always was, to the public and sometimes also to themselves. Lorde's previous album, 2021's Solar Power , was presented at the time as a kind of manifesto of psycho-spiritual liberation, of unplugging from the celebrity rat race in favor of the natural world . But as she's revealed in recent interviews , Solar Power turned out to be more like Lorde's version of My Year of Rest and Relaxation — a young woman going to delusional extremes to avoid feeling her real feelings, including a self-image crisis and eating disorder. No wonder, then, that the subdued music felt so unsettled and ambiguous to many listeners who'd loved the forthright energy of Lorde's first two albums .
Virgin recovers that boldness, as both career and creativity required. There's been some effort to bill it as a combination of breakup album and self-reinventing triumph—a story of self-recovery, perhaps, with the clean slate the title half-jokingly implies. It's more of an immersion in what Lorde's been through ever since she became a 16-year-old global pop star with the hit “Royals” a dozen years ago, and her efforts to improvise a life in her wake. As widely reported, that's involved some psychedelic drug therapy here, some attempting gender rethinking there. But thankfully this is not really an album about looking back in newly enlightened serenity. It's one about being in medias res, in the middle of a complicated mess, by turns excited, pissed off, confused, numb, relapsing, hedonistic, regretful, and grasping for insight.
To make it, Lorde turned from her longtime co-writing and producing partner Jack Antonoff to lesser-known producer Jim-E Stack , who also worked on the most recent Bon Iver album. Rather than the big dance-floor sound of Lorde's 2017 pop classic Melodrama , they're giving more of an update of the clipped minimalism of her debut Pure Heroine , a record that's evoked by name on the final track here, “David” (where Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver also contributes guitar). As in 2013, most of these songs begin from looped drum and synth beats, and often stay like that for long stretches. Both “David” and opener “Hammer” feature staticky, stroboscopic pulses that feel like they could induce seizures, like they're coming from both outside and within the protagonist's head, like the sound of memory glitching. In between, the rhythm beds—more precisely placed guitars, live drums, pianos, and occasional strings—provide plenty of sonic space for Lorde's earthy contralto and vaulting self-harmonizing to control the pace and the mood.
What she fills it with is neither the cutting cerebral poetry of her earliest songs nor the emotional theatrics of the aptly named Melodrama. To those poles of mind and heart, Virgin insistently adds the body. Unlike a lot of ex-teen stars who make bumping and grinding their first priority upon reaching the age of majority, Lorde's never been so explicitly sexual, not the way she is here. She sings on “Shapeshifter” about “everyone that I've slept with, all the pairs of hands”—as she told Zane Lowe in a recent interview, she had in mind Tracey Emin's famous installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, just as the videos for “Man of the Year” and “Hammer” evoke 1970s feminist, body-centered performance art . In “Current Affairs,” she sings of someone who “tasted [her] underwear,” and on “Clearblue” (named for the brand of pregnancy test) in an Imogen Heap–like a cappella electronic choir with herself that “I rode you until I cried/ How's it feel being this alive?” Elsewhere she partakes equally viscerally in drugs and cigarettes, workouts and swimming, “swish[ing] mouthwash and jerk[ing] off.” For someone dealing with body dysmorphia, that all seems healthy compared with what happens on the uncomfortable banger “Broken Glass,” where she finds herself “getting lost in math” (counting calories and pounds) and fantasizing about punching the mirror to teach herself a lesson.
Most of these scenes come and go quickly, both within and between songs. They're less like the writerly rhetoric of Pure Heroine or the storytelling of Melodrama than quick painterly gestures that don't add up to a multidimensional portrait until the end. When I heard the first two lead singles “ What Was That ” and “ Man of the Year ” in April and May, I worried that they felt kind of ephemeral and incomplete. Listening to the whole album, I realize that's because it's less a collection of songs than a continuous 35-minute piece, in which each track is only one chapter, one perspective. Many of the songs cut off after barely three minutes, just when they could potentially break into a bigger anthemic section—but that level of payoff would suggest a false or premature sense of resolution. There are plenty of passages to get the heart racing, but most of them soon double back to lower tempos for the sake of emotional realism.
As Lorde said as far back as 2018, “ If you're here for the commercial performance of my work, you'll only become more and more disenchanted .” These songs aren't fated to be radio hits, though “Shapeshifter” might be an exception, partly because at 4:17 (the longest on the album) it has some time to build up hooks. But they are the kind to maintain Lorde's status as your favorite pop star.
The current cycle began last year with Charli XCX's “Girl, So Confusing,” which was about their relationship, as Lorde emerged to address her body issues and other questions in her verse on the remix . Dan Nigro, key collaborator with Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, lends a production hand on a couple of tracks here, and even Jack Harlow reportedly offered feedback . Lorde's longtime mutual exchange of influence with Taylor Swift also continues, as I'm reminded by the high-drama, syllable-by-syllable stresses on the bridge of “Favourite Daughter”—in which Lorde demands of her mother, Sonja Yelich, her first booster as an artist, but also a famous New Zealand poet in her own right, “I keep dancing till I get sick/ Why'd you have to dream so big?” She refers to inherited family trauma in a couple of other places, as on “Clearblue,” when she sings, “There's broken blood in me, it passed through my mother from her mother down to me.”
Family is not the only force in her life Lorde tries to call to account here. As she's said, there are “composites of memories” involved, but the involved figures must include Justin Warren , the music executive she was romantically entangled with for some seven years; he was nearly twice her age. Hearing lines like “Since I was 17, I gave you everything” (“What Was That”) or “Hope you find another starlet” (“If She Could See Me Now”) and “Was I just someone to dominate? … Was I just young blood to get on tape?” (“David”)—these are indictments of the whole music business.
In fact, “David” casts a shadow back across the whole album, a whispered response to an implied whodunnit, which must also include her own audience within the teen-star-industrial complex. Lorde's work was so advanced beyond her years, and so different from stereotypical Svengali-produced teen pop, that we might have blithely imagined she was somehow protected from the worst risks. But as we've learned from Swift, Billie Eilish , and countless others before them, giftedness, and family support, can only mitigate the damage at best. As much as one can hear Virgin as a taking stock and deconstruction on Lorde's part, even as a rebirth as advertised, it can also stand as a victim impact statement.
If that darkness is challenging to reconcile with how pleasurable the music and the vitality of her persona (her mask) here can be, that's part of the point too. While not everything lands—the protesting-too-much about being a “grown woman” on “GRWM” only makes her sound less mature—most of it keeps sounding better with every replay. Compared with this month's other prominent “breakup” album, Haim's I Quit , Virgin is far more vulnerable, allowing the most abject and desecrated feelings to course through. As Lorde sings in her best goddaughter-of-Kate-Bush stamp, “I bring the pain out of the synthesizer/ The bodies move like there's spirits inside 'em.” This album knows something many would-be “empowerment pop”–makers misunderstand, that often what validates audiences most is to hear our weakness and woundedness expressed at levels we can't articulate for ourselves, and transfigured into beauty. Sad songs relieve sad people of their isolation, and broken bangers help make our broken estate (which is ultimately everybody's) a condition we can live through. Like we've been touched, all over again, for the very first time.
