If Lorde’s last album Solar Power (2021) was an exercise in pastel escapism—sun-bleached beaches, organic contours, and the slow exhale of leaving the trappings of social media and fame behind—then Virgin is what happens when the sun goes down and all the soft focus evaporates. Her fourth album ditches the warm colours and smooth soundscapes for jagged edges and darker hues: bruised purples, deep indigos. Yet the colours shimmer with the messy promise of renewal. The album’s title and the artwork—an x-ray of the singer’s pelvis with a visible birth control IUD—encapsulates the tension at the heart of Virgin: an artist reckoning with the end of a defining relationship, the confusion of young adulthood, and the reclamation of her own body and narrative.
Read more: Album review: Solar Power
Rebirth runs through every corner of Virgin, though it’s rarely clean or triumphant. The opener ‘Hammer’ sets the album’s tone and the theme with a taut, minimal beat that blossoms into a fractured chorus. “I might have been born again // I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers” she confesses, sounding as though she’s catching her breath between collapse and metamorphosis. We also get hints of the subject of gender fluidity with “Some days, I’m a woman some days, I’m a man.”
The question of gender fluidity specifically with respect to the body is another theme that runs throughout. The title Virgin evokes a specific gendered narrative around women’s sexuality but by pairing it with an album cover X-ray of her IUD she blurs the line into sexual autonomy. Similarly in songs such as ‘Clearblue’ and ‘Shapeshifter’ Lorde introduces ambiguity into the agency around sex; is she in charge of her own body and outcomes?
If ‘Hammer’ is the blueprint for this new self, then the second track, ‘What Was That,’ acts as the linchpin between the more accessible bright neon colours of Melodrama and the darker world of Virgin. The song also expands on the other theme of heartbreak and reclamation after the ending of a relationship that consumed a large part of her youth. Over a pulsing, almost euphoric synth line she sings: “Since I was seventeen, I gave you everything // Now we wake from a dream, well, baby, what was that?” It’s the closest the entire record gets to an earworm and a proper banger. Yet even this moment of a more mainstream pop sound doesn’t dilute the record’s raw tone.
From the outset, the striking feature of Virgin is how unmistakably personal and intimate it feels. This is less a Lorde album than an Ella Yelich-O’Connor one, and no subject feels taboo. Lacking the deep poetic thinking of Pure Heroine and the emotional heartbeats of Melodrama, the album doesn’t shy away from visceral and sexually explicit imagery. ‘Current Affairs’ is filled with sexual descriptions: “You tasted my underwear” plus an apparent reference to the Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson sex tape. On ‘Clear Blue’ she sings “I rode you until I cried.” The brutal ‘Broken Glass’ powerfully explores body dysmorphia and fantasising about punching mirrors. This imagery places the listener in the uncomfortable position of being witnesses to the rawest parts of embodiment in its most vulnerable form, where the body is never just a site of pleasure but also of fear, uncertainty, and consequence. Lorde shows how one’s own body can both empower and de-stabilise, with the ambiguity between control and surrender.
Virgin isn’t about the shock factor. Instead, these confessions sit alongside a wider tapestry of artistic references that underscore Lorde’s search for identity following her break-up. ’Shapeshifter’, for example, contains lyrics that reference Tracy Emin’s art installation, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With”. The lyrics and video of ‘Hammer’ evoke 1970s feminist performance art, such as Marina Abramović.
There are two songs with a clear link between the body, identity and reclamation—central pillars of the album. ‘Clearblue’ hovers between vulnerability and dread, recounting a pregnancy scare as a metaphor for the way she let herself disappear into someone else’s life. The production starts spare—breathy vocals, a skeletal bassline—before swelling into a tense, skittering climax that sounds like anxiety. ‘Shapeshifter’ explores the fluidity of identity (as opposed to gender), her voice slipping between resignation and defiance as she sings about being what she thinks her partner needs. It’s a message that could double as a subtitle for the entire album: the exhausting work of trying to separate who you are from who you learned to be.
The track listing also explores the impact of other relationships on our sense of self, weaving their way into the central act of the record. ‘Favourite Daughter’ is an achingly honest reflection on her relationship with her mother. There’s poignancy in the lyrics about the move to adulthood as the singer sings “Breaking my back to be your favourite daughter” but changing it on the very last line to be “Breaking my back just to be as brave as my mother”.
On ‘GRWM’(Grown Woman), she questions what it means to be an adult over a buoyant, mid-tempo groove, “Wide hips, soft lips, my mama’s trauma // Since ‘96 been looking for a grown woman.” The battle between the confident soundscape from her teenage years and the angst-filled lyrics of adulthood gives Virgin its crackling inner core, helping explain the juxtaposition of sounds within the same track.
This is not an easy listen; while Virgin draws heavily from the late-night club textures of Melodrama, it’s less eager to please. The production from Lorde, collaborating with Jim-E Stack and Bon Iver among others, is superb but the colours are more opaque and the edges are jarring. Even in its most reflective moments, the album refuses to settle into a single mood. ‘Broken Glass’ pairs one of her biggest choruses with lyrics that refuse to romanticise the trauma of body dysmorphia: “I want to punch the mirror // To make her see that this won’t last.”
On the slow-build convulsive ‘If She Could See Me Now’ the singer taunts an ex that she can now lift their body weight in the gym in a song about healing from a break-up. In a line perfect for describing the arrangements on the album, Lorde sings “I bring the pain out the synthesiser” against a staccato percussion backdrop that builds to layered harmonies and soaring synths. Lyrics of unflinching self-examination, set to restless brash production, has become a recent hallmark of pop’s innovators.
Like Taylor Swift before her with Midnights and, more so, Charli XCX with Brat, Lorde is breaking convention that deeply personal subjects should be explored through ballads. Experimental synths and crashing percussion don’t make natural bedfellows for personal trauma, but the jarring switches make it feel raw. These are songs about learning the hard way that adulthood isn’t a destination but a practice, something you have to re-choose every day.
By the time Virgin closes with ‘David’—a hushed, bittersweet acceptance, with the closest sound to Solar Power—it’s clear that this is not a record interested in easy catharsis. Lacking the percussion and distortion of other tracks this is where Lorde finds her voice. “I don’t belong to anyone” she proclaims in a note of personal reclamation to end the record.
Virgin is an album that yields its riches slowly, demanding you sit with its discomfort and complexity. There are no clear anthems here, but something more rewarding: the sound of an artist reclaiming her shape—even if she has to break herself open to do it.
Words by Andrew Butcher
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