Virgin is best when Lorde is wide open
Lorde’s fourth album ranges from profound to underwhelming to emphatically bad
★★★☆☆
Virgin
Lorde
Universal Music New Zealand and Republic Records
June 27, 2025
The release years of Lorde’s albums are always 1 mod 4: the messy, overwhelming afterglow of U.S. presidential elections, 29-day-Februarys, and gymnasts sticking every landing at the Summer Olympics. Her music has always been appropriately verklempt. In 2013, Pure Heroine redefined teen angst and braggadocio. 2017’s Melodrama did the same for young adult heartbreak. But when the pandemic warped everyone’s psyche, Lorde was no exception: Solar Power (2021) was more sigh than snarl, full of acoustic guitars and anodyne paeans to the beach.
Virgin, released on June 27, sees the singer return to her roots: big feelings, electronic instrumentals, and the city. This ruinously introspective former child star wants to know what it means to go, to come back, to come clean, to become again. She’s also interested in coming: despite the name, Virgin is her most explicit album, and its standout tracks are its least safe for work.
Lorde, a.k.a. Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, is off birth control and extraordinarily horny (“Hammer”). She’s also grappling with her gender identity (“Man of the Year”), in recovery from an eating disorder (“Broken Glass”), striving for her mother’s validation (“Favourite Daughter”), single after many years of dating old(er) men (“David”) — and still doing hard drugs (“What Was That”). What, she asks, is the cost of unfucking your life? Can you even do that? Should you even try?
The answering 11-track album is hit-or-miss. At her best, Lorde channels the energy of her first two albums; at her worst, she’s inane in new and unwelcome ways. Virgin marks her first album co-produced by Jim-E Stack. Previously, the two collaborated on her 2024 cover of “Take Me to the River,” a fun but forgettable ditty that exactly zero people thought would replace the Talking Heads’ version. Later that year, Stack helped write Charli XCX’s “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde,” the Internet-breaking track that restarted Brat Summer and firmly reintroduced Yelich-O’Connor to the world of electropop.
On Virgin, Stack often uses a trick from his work on Caroline Polachek’s mind-melting fantasia “Welcome To My Island”: just letting the woman sing. Lorde’s voice, mature at 28, is a wailing, octave-hopping delight, and when she provides her own backing vocals on “Clearblue,” she sounds raw and real, filtered but absent of instrumentals.
At other points, Stack’s light touch feels more like negligence, especially when Virgin’s lyrics, usually the highlights of Lorde’s projects, range from profound to underwhelming to emphatically bad. Often, she returns to old standards: Lorde? Warbling about summer to a minimal beat? Groundbreaking! (One can’t help but ask: would Jack Antonoff have let her do this?)
Still, this tumultuous cycle might just be part of growing up, and after all, Lorde is a master of the endless loop. You can easily spend hours listening to “Ribs” or “Green Light” over and over again — pacing your childhood bedroom, flopping onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling: too far to touch, same as it ever was. Every listen reveals a new flaw in your character, a new reason you should have said yes, a new counterargument to a point made years ago. “I’ll come get my things, but I can’t let go,” Lorde sings. Neither can you.
The best songs on Virgin have that infinite quality. “What Was That,” the album’s lead single, was released on April 24. According to Last.fm, I’ve listened to it 69 times since. The pulsing beat could’ve come straight out of Melodrama; the lyrics are both specific enough to be confessional (“I wear smoke like a wedding veil”) and general enough to be relatable (“I want you just like that”). Listening to it, you itch to dance.
As breakup anthems go, however, “What Was That” is surpassed by “Current Affairs,” a simmering, vulnerable track that calls out to Lorde’s lover, her mother, and the listener. The post-chorus samples Dexta Daps’ song “Morning Love,” a triumphant, explicit ode to intercourse, but Lorde is more cautious: she tells us that she’s “so scared.” Yelich-O’Connor is a human being who makes stupid choices — watching the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee sex tape and initially thinking that it’s “pure and true,” or dating a man who blames his bad behavior on the titular “current affairs” — but her admissions of failure make the song more human.
The album’s second-most explicit track, “Clearblue,” named after the pregnancy test, frames intimacy as a way to better conceive of the self. Lorde mixes metaphors in an attempt to explain this thesis, but nothing feels contrived. The lover-as-excavator slings his “metal detector” into her “precious treasure” and pushes his “helix… right through” her. Despite a few inanities (“How’s it feel being this alive?”), Lorde is at her strongest and most honest singing about being “so bare in the throes.”
On the other hand, the lilting “GRWM” is just dumb. When Lorde exults in her status as a “grown woman in a baby tee,” you wonder about the merits on which she claims the first few words — isn’t this song named after a TikTok trend? Am I about to watch her dab her face with concealer to a soothing, AI-generated lofi tune? Like the lowest points of Solar Power, the track’s insubstantial lyrics match its boringly airy instrumentals.
Similarly, the lines “In the gym, I’m exorcising / All my demons” in “If She Could See Me Now” are breathtakingly stupid. I’m reminded of Lucy Dacus, another great indie pop artist who put out a somewhat disappointing fourth effort this year. When a good lyricist turns to wordplay, whether it’s Dacus asking her lesbian partner to “come out, come out wherever you are” or Lorde smugly announcing that she “lifted [her ex’s] body weight,” you know something is off.
Ultimately, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my least favorite songs are those where Lorde feels most purportedly empowered. Yelich-O’Connor flatly stating “last year was bad” on “Broken Glass,” then describing the symptoms of her eating disorder, is much more touching than her crowing “2009 me’d be so impressed” on “GRWM.” Deep down, we don’t want our superstars to polish themselves into shiny objects, especially not the ones who become famous for a song that starts “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh.” On “Shapeshifter,” where dizzy instrumentals swirl around stream-of-consciousness staccato musings, Lorde tells us, “I’ve been up on the pedestal / But tonight I just wanna fall.” Maybe I’m just another “hot mess in an antique skirt,” but in my mind, there’s nothing more grown than realizing how lost you truly are.