“I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” Lorde sings on Virgin’s opening track, ‘Hammer’. That doesn’t mean she’s not searching, but on the pop star’s first album in four years, she embraces that feeling. When she sings of the “peace in the madness over our heads,” it’s not reflective of the kind of healing journey that polarized listeners on 2021’s Solar Power so much as beginning to accept it in messy, sometimes subdued, occasionally blissful fashion. While Lorde’s shortest album to date, it is far from her least impactful, mirroring the fluidity she’s discovering in her gender expression and carrying wounds both self-inflicted and relational: hazy yet thorny, guttural yet ambiguous, that self glitching in and out of view yet somehow sounding impervious in its vulnerability. More than stoking the flames, she’s stuck in her thoughts and staking her ground over every heartbreak, fear, and false image thrust into its orbit.
1. Hammer
If Virgin’s earlier singles simmered with frustration while sweating it out, its final preview and opening track effectively frames the whole album as a euphoric release. Though just thirteen seconds over the three-minute mark, ‘Hammer’ feels like its most fleshed-out track, the production getting thicker when you expect it to dissolve and Lorde’s voice reaching higher up for transcendence. She is immediately in the zone, threading poetry between nouns that set the stage – heat, love, ovulation – before putting the same emphasis on a simple string of verbs: “I burn, and I sing, and I scheme, and I dance.” But there absolutely are sentences that serve as declarative thesis statements, far more than flowery missiles. “When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” “Some days, I’m a woman, some days, I’m a man.” And the most biting: “I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.” She won’t stay holed up, she seems to say, but she’s not content to play the part either. In between, always, is the real deal.
2. What Was That
I’ve already written a fair bit about Virgin’s lead single and played it many times leading up to the album’s release, but was still curious how it’d fare in the context of the record. With its placement after ‘Hammer’, I hear ‘What Was That’ as: now let me jerk those tears; invoke post-adolescent devotion in the shadow of trauma; send those Melodrama shivers down your spine with a single pulsating synth. Of course Lorde knows it is no ‘Green Light’ – don’t you hear what she sings as her own backup? “When I’m in the blue light, I can make it alright.” ‘What Was That’ doesn’t conjure the ghost of a masterpiece so much as it stands as a rebuttal, and haunted double, of the it is what it is mindset pervading today’s carefree, complacent pop, perturbed even in its catharsis. At the end of the day, really what I hear is: Here’s me all over again. Are you actually listening?
3. Shapeshifter
Up until this point, Lorde has mostly been singing over punchy, kinetic production; ‘Shapeshifter’ is the first moment they really fold into one (and the one that most sounds like the album cover.) Jim-E-Stack’s shuffling beat is familiar and dusted like a good old piece of paper – down to his use of the OP-1 synth, there’s something skeletal about each texture – so Lorde leans into it, unraveling patterns of compulsive behaviour without the need to cast away or resolve them. She may be back to making bangers, but not without allowing herself an anthem of disaffection: “Tonight I just wanna fall,” she sulks, Rob Moose’s strings swooning in like a kind of permission. Nothing more, nothing less.
4. Man of the Year
TikTok drama aside, ‘Man of the Year’, like its predecessor, hits harder on Virgin than as a standalone single. “You met me at a really strange time in my life,” Lorde sings, but there’s a present-tense groundedness to the track, owed in part to that lone bass guitar; aren’t the rest of us only now meeting this person – this “someone more like myself”? The singer keeps her vulnerability intact, her language somatic and light on metaphors; but the strangeness sweeps into the production, which slowly gives the climactic ballad a distorted, discomfiting edge. The catharsis isn’t always satisfying, but it is ripe with yearning. We better lean in, too.
5. Favourite Daughter
In total admiration and empathy for her poet mother, Sonja Yelich, Lorde strips any poetic ambiguity off the lyrics of ‘Favorite Daughter’, streamlining her message of always chasing maternal validation. Even the instrumentation calls as far back as the Pure Heroine era, so you have to trust it as an artistic throughline rather than a piece of revisionist history, casting her every word and performance as a line of communication. What most instills fear in her, though, isn’t any resemblance to her mother – “the blueprint for me,” Lorde told Zane Lowe – but her uncle: “You told us as kids/ He died of a broken heart.” Stardom as an inherited dream – that’s one thing; snuck in there is a cautionary tale that’d make anyone lay their hearts open.
6. Current Affairs
At the torn, complicated heart of Virgin is ‘Current Affairs’, which boasts elements of several other songs on it. The placement feels correct, as the bravery Lorde seeks to model suddenly disintegrates: “Mama, I’m so scared.” A nod to the friends talking current affairs in ‘What Was That’, doubling its meaning – could be your current affairs. The promiscuity of ‘Shapeshifter’, zoomed in: “He spit in my mouth like/ He’s saying a prayer.” Even an older song, Dexta Daps’ hit ‘Morning Love’, curiously and hypnotically sampled, rolls in like a cloud. Lorde isn’t seeing it all drift by in a haze, though; the entanglement is sharp and devastating. Her moans on the chorus recall ‘Hammer’, but her voice is wounded and coiled, not ecstatic. It’s not the messiness that renders it beautiful, but both qualities are undeniable.
7. Clearblue
Though he doesn’t contribute to the record until its final moments, Bon Iver’s influence (I’m thinking ‘Awards Season’) looms over the vocoder-laced ‘Clearblue’, whose sparseness feels like an extension of the previous song’s emotional and sexual reckoning. “I rode you until I cried/ How’s it feel being this alive?” she intones, but really seems to be asking: What comes after this feeling of aliveness? A pregnancy scare inspires a meditation on openness, freedom, and intergenerational trauma (her mother comes back into the frame), in a way that seems to blur and tie them altogether.
8. GRWM
The track eases the tension of the album by way of simplification, its message a recurring theme: “Since ’96, been looking for a grown woman.” Jim-E Stack’s productions hark back to Melodrama, this time without much of a twist. In a playful and obviously childish manner, ‘GRWM’ just hammers its point home. “A grown woman in a baby tee” is Lorde’s version of “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby” and you can argue about how purposefully awkward or funny it is, but it’s certainly not the best that Virgin has to offer.
9. Broken Glass
Minimal and metallic, the song’s production may not be the most inventive on the album, but it gives way to one of Lorde’s most elastic and devastating performances. Melodrama certainly had bangers like this, but were they delivered with the same teeth-baring specificity? Were they this powerfully blunt and unromantic? “Mystique is dead” is the first line on this track about battling an eating disorder, which focuses less on stereotypes or obsessing over looks than the cruel arithmetic and shame that pound onward. Rather than letting the questions echo in the chorus, as in ‘What Was That’, the singer directs them back to herself in an attempt to break through. “I wanna punch the mirror/ To make her see that this won’t last.” It’s more than a shrug, the “huh, all of the above” more than a sigh. It’s laying out the shards and hoping others will still find themselves reflected, understanding that it – like a good pop song – can only last so long.
10. If She Could See Me Now
Interpolating Baby Bash’s 2003 hit ‘Suga Suga’, ‘If She Could See Me Now’ is catchy but a little muddled, speaking of emotional exorcism but delivering way less of it than most of Virgin. As an indictment of the music industry and a toxic relationship that was inextricable from it, it works just as well, but the clunkiness of lines like “I’m a mystic/ I swim in waters/ That would drown so many other bitches” detract more than underline the point.
11. David
Like ‘Clearblue’, the closer peels back the production to focus on, and pointedly distort, the intimacy of Lorde’s voice, this time petering out instead of swirling in a choir of its own. And while ‘Clearblue’ zeroes in on one incident, ‘David’ zooms out, circling back to the dissolution of a relationship that permeates, but hardly dominates, Virgin. “Who’s gon’ love me like this?” becomes “Am I ever gon’ love again?” Yet its proclamation of independence (“I don’t belong to anyone”) entails adding myself to that question and having enough faith to answer in the affirmative, all while recognizing that everyone else is looking in the same mirror – or at the same hole in it. That’s the darkness we’re staring into, at the end of the day, and Lorde’s here to remind us it’s still alive with possibility.
