When Lorde emerged on the music scene at 16 years old, seemingly fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus’s head, preternatural precociousness was part of her appeal. As an old soul immersed in youth culture, the clear-eyed certainty with which she observed her world permeates her early albums. Her knack for putting the exact right words to growing up in the 21st century earned her a cult following of young people who looked to her to make sense of their lives. Even when she rejected this devotion on her last album Solar Power(“If you’re looking for a savior, that’s not me”) she was still a “prettier Jesus” preaching from a place of self-assuredness, the “Girl (Who’s Seen It All)” and could pass on that wisdom to her followers.
Not anymore. On her messy, visceral fourth album, Virgin, Lorde finally manages to take herself off the pedestal. Her immense songwriting talent is still on display, but the lyrics purposely shed the perfect precision of previous work. (Lorde told Rolling Stone that “in the past, I’m really trying to craft these lyrics. This time I was like, ‘No, be smart enough to let it be really basic. Be plain with language and see what happens.'”) The result is urgent, immediate, and alive in a way Lorde has never been before—and few of her peers could accomplish.
There will be inevitable comparisons to Charli XCX’s Brat, which Lorde (who featured on the beloved “Girl, so confusing” remix) has said influenced her own work. Like Brat, Virgin favors straightforward language and makes dance-pop out of heavy introspection, trading in topics like generational trauma and disordered eating. But Virgin is really a return to the form Lorde herself pioneered on her debut album Pure Heroine; the dark, spare electronic beats of that record had a huge influence on subsequent pop music. Virgin marries that Pure Heroine sensibility with the more naturalistic, acoustic sounds present on Melodrama and Solar Power to surprising effect. A single song will veer into drastically different sonic directions that nevertheless feel inevitable by the time it’s over. The lyrical delivery can be syncopated and strange, her typical hyperverbal writing style resistant to easy rhyme or simple resolution. And there are a handful of moments that showcase exciting new sides of her vocal abilities.
All of this is only possible through Lorde’s dogged commitment to transparency, which includes owning up to ugliness: teeth rotting from an eating disorder (“Broken Glass”); problematic viewing of a forbidden sex tape (“Current Affairs”); extreme people pleasing (“Shapeshifter” and “Favorite Daughter”). Virgin emanates self-acceptance, but not in the way Solar Power did. That record presented a tidy conclusion to coming-of-age that ended in a settled identity. On Virgin, Lorde knows that she doesn’t always know, that identity is evolving and ever unfinished (“I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” as she sings on “Hammer”). Even her most definitive song, “GRWM,” leaves room for doubt. Adulthood is “Jumping from stone to stone in a riverbed, I guess,” she shrugs playfully. “Maybe you finally know who you wanna be / a grown woman in a baby tee.” Previous iterations of Lorde wouldn’t be content with “maybe,” but this version reserves the right to change her mind in the future.
Accepting life’s gray areas doesn’t just exhibit personal growth, it makes the album—and the artist—more “rugged” (her word) but also more contemporary. She’s able to embrace her role as a “mystic” who “[swims] in waters that would drown so many other bitches,” she sings on “If She Could See Me Now” before mischievously quoting “Suga Suga” by Baby Bash (“Got me lifted, feeling so gifted”). See, Lorde is no longer the kind of mystic who sits high on the hill looking down. She’s among the people, listening to the same songs we do, going to the gym, jerking off, letting somebody spit in her mouth. The album’s dedication to viscera emphasizes that she’s a real, flesh-and-blood 28-year-old woman, not an ageless, unknowable idol.
If there’s a fault in Virgin, it’s that the hyperspecificity can occasionally render it unrelatable (“Favorite Daughter,” for instance, is relatable in concept, but allusions to the jet-setting lifestyle of a young pop star with a poet mother are pretty unique). That’s the price of entry for a project so baldly honest, and a worthwhile one to pay. More often, the specificity is a benefit, like all great songs that use individual experiences as a doorway to universality. Take the affecting “Clearblue,” which starts particular—”After the ecstasy, testing for pregnancy”—but broadens into an achingly human and beautifully expressed sentiment about how relationships feel like they can change us down to the DNA. Or the gorgeous album closer “David,” which is so particular to Lorde and her relationship that it name-drops her first album. Yet the track opens up to an ecstatic melancholy that could resonate with anyone: “So why do we run to the ones we do?” she asks. Like the fans who see her as an anointed icon, Lorde has sought her own objects of worship in imperfect places. “I made you god ’cause it was all that I knew how to do / but I don’t belong to anyone,” she sings.
For those still clamoring for Lorde to tell them how to feel, the pop star does indeed tap into something quintessential about being alive in 2025. “Current Affairs,” for instance, feels like an anxious but accurate reflection of how difficult it is to disentangle our personal dramas from the dystopia of the outside world. Listeners will surely find themselves in these songs, but the conversation is less between the artist and the audience than the artist and herself. On Virgin, Lorde speaks to the person in the mirror, to the innocent teenager she once was, to the masculine and the feminine she recognizes within herself today. Throughout her career, we’ve watched Lorde grow up, but from a mysterious remove. Now she invites us deep inside the flawed process of personhood, both profound and mundane, mortal and divine. Virgin is an album so earnestly, painfully vulnerable you can almost see straight through to the blood and guts. It’s not always polished or pretty, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s alive.
