“Last year was bad,” Lorde sings at the opening of “Broken Glass” on her fourth album Virgin. That bad year has led Lorde to unravel again, though this time less in a less spectacular fashion than her still-beloved 2017 offering Melodrama. Instead, Virgin playfully oscillates between subtlety and directness, between heightened emotion and the numbing dread that follows. It’s a Lorde album, through and through; though this time, the magic is a little harder to find.
When we last heard a new Lorde album, she was digging her toes in the New Zealand sand, rejecting the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and relishing in the restorative power of the sun. But post-Solar Power, something shifted in Lorde; especially when she was called upon last year to answer to Charli XCX, who offered a surprisingly meaty meditation on female friendships with “Girl, so confusing.” Lorde showed up to work it out on the remix, and in turn, offered a detailed and remarkably honest explanation: She was suffering, “at war” with her body and starving herself, projecting her insecurities onto others.
That little remix contained some of Lorde’s sharpest confessional writing and helped illuminate why so many cling to her voice. She has the capacity to cut through busy, loaded instrumentals, to mine the inexpressible feelings of adolescence and adulthood with a pointed tongue and a stylized pop production. “It’s just self defense until you’re building a weapon,” she sang, a poignant note of accountability balanced against the psychological paradoxes of womanhood.
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On Virgin, Lorde picks up where she left off on “Girl, so confusing” and deepens her investigations. The album, which clocks in at a brisk 34 minutes, dives into Lorde’s psyche over the last two years and once again presents some searingly honest epiphanies. She wrestles with a bad breakup and a harrowing eating disorder. She smokes cigarettes and does drugs, though not with the kind of raw abandonment found in Melodrama. She has recovered her cellular from the water and has been on the prowl, looking for love and connection while doomscrolling and comparing her figure to the bodies on Instagram. She’s gone to therapy, a lot of therapy. She’s also expanding her relationship to gender, as so many of her generation are doing. Ah, adulthood in the 2020s.