In Lorde‘s 4th studio album, Virgin, she has somehow found a way to elevate to new heights her own previously lauded ability to write with distinct precision. These are Everest heights, with the singer taking the listener with her to take painstaking, sharp yet shallow breaths of pure, cold and scarce oxygen. The icy blue of the album cover is a warning to its viewer of this destination. Contained within, at the summit of the album, Lorde turns us around to look through and beyond a veil of clouds to see glimpses of her worst self and how she came to forgive that version of Ella.

While for many other singers who have yet to even scrape 30, an album so self reflective of personal growth might be discarded with an eye-roll for its self-indulgent and pre-emptive naval gazing, the story of Lorde’s career is key to this being an exceptional case. Even passive listeners of the artist who perhaps haven’t been up to date with the singer since Melodrama‘s anthemic ‘Green Light‘ will recall that much of the excitement with her ascent was to do with just how young she was when it all took place. A SoundCloud success story, the New Zealand-born artist was no more than 17 when her life was changed for good with the global success of breakout single ‘Royals‘. Here she stood, catapulted by the digital age of music distribution, releasing an album that emphasised just how middle-class and blasé her own life was at the time.

Yet in listening to that, everyone from critics to fans to casual radio listeners could see through her eyes the everyday-magic and grit she found around her in tennis courts and train stations. From that point on, the singer, who still holds the record for youngest Grammy Award winner in the Song of the Year category, became a symbol. A symbol in a time when it was very-in to make teenagers symbols of movements, like the fictional Katniss Everdeen. So much so that Lorde would go on to be the natural choice for the person commissioned to curate the soundtrack for Katniss Everdeen in the final instalments of the Hunger Games filmic franchise.

More prolific readers of popular culture will know that it didn’t stop there for her, in spite of a slowing of the mainstream success. On social media, as is the gist of many recycled tweets, Lorde is still frequently associated with the major milestones of Gen Z’s life. Her disregard of the social hierarchies associated with teenagerhood revolutionised our high school experience; her embrace of a party lifestyle signalled our own excitement for years of broken glasses and molly; her weird hippieish era, although an awkward dance with her listeners, reflected our own weird dance with a freshly post-COVID (kinda?) world.

And then there was nothing. For a long time (which is not unusual for Lorde). 

A brat-green light gave us our first look back into the private world of the singer post Solar Power with her feature on Charli xcx‘s ‘Girl, so confusing‘ remix. Fans of Charli quickly pieced together that the original song was about the British singer’s tenuous relationship with Lorde, made worse by the music industry’s tripwire designed to create animosity amongst female pop vocalists. Given the context of what might otherwise have been read as a slant, Lorde‘s heartfelt admission of how much of these tensions arose from her own internal battles with eating disorders and misogyny immediately emerged as a shining gem in her songwriting book. Perhaps for the first time in her career at this scale, and perhaps as a strategic re-introduction through a somewhat different lens, Lorde bears her worst insecurities to an audience. Lorde is sometimes a bad feminist. She is susceptible to the noise of everything around her. An already thin Lorde sings of being at war with her body in an attempt to be smaller. The Lorde of 2013 who was too cool to be obsessed with teeth whitening like her shallow peers, envies others and is snappy.

In Virgin, all of this context is relevant. In a self referential nod to that Lorde of 2013, on the album’s closing track ‘David‘, the songstress cries out: 

“Oh dark day, was I just young blood to get on tape?

Cause you dialled me out when it got hard Upper-cut to the throat; I was off guard

Pure Heroine mistaken for featherweight“

In this moment, the singer contends with two difficult realities. The one being the cannon moment in one’s 20s when you are going through the absolute lowest points of your life, and, to make matters worse, are paired with a partner who preys on that state of fragility. The other, which is a tougher reality and threads its way through the album, is that her early meteoric rise gave her an inflated sense of surety through her teens to mid 20s. This delusion of grandeur, especially in the face of being with a partner who abuses power, is not a unique one nor a fault of her own. Lorde‘s actual unique problem is that as privately as her relationship problems might be kept, her life in the public feeds back intensely into every intangible sphere of her private life. 

Track 5, ‘Favourite Daughter’, exemplifies just how her life of fame adds a painful complexity into her relationship with her own mother, poet Sonja Yelich. On first listen, the track stands out as being a bit heavy handed in the singer’s vocal delivery, particularly in the chorus. The tone is shrill, “Cause I’m an actress!” and feeds into the 8-bit world established by the beat, co-produced with Jim-E Stack. After a few listens, it’s obvious (too obvious?) that the overtly cheery tone of the song represents the singer’s strange relationship with her mother’s unwavering support of her career. What should be a sweet ode to a mother’s love turns out to be a story of projection; the projection of a fellow artist who never received half the love from her own family or the world around her. ‘Favourite Daughter’ – go figure – grows on you, as you see it as a freshly inkjet printed family portrait, smudged by an overly precious Lorde‘s hard pressing fingers. It’s an innocence perverted by too many factors predating its singer. 

Album opener ‘Hammer’ speaks to the artist’s difficulty in understanding what innocence she still holds, as a girl forced to grow up too quickly. Lorde described the track as an ode to the city and horniness; two sites which are infamously disorienting. Early in the song, Lorde highlights the difficulty in distinguishing between love and ovulation. In this ode to horniness, she lays the first seed in what becomes a vine of Biblical incantations through the album, as she opines:

“I might’ve been born again

I’m ready to feel like

I don’t have the answers

There’s peace in the madness over our heads

Let it carry me up” 

What is carnal and what is pure swirls around Lorde‘s head at around 130 BPM and results in a rare and exciting display of some light vocal gymnastics before feeding directly into the certifiable banger ‘What Was That’. In the album’s lead single, she once again points to her meteoric rise to fame forcing her to relinquish an innocence early, as the pre-chorus chants “Since I was 17, I gave you everything / Now we wake from a dream, well, baby what was that?”. 

After much giving, in the belly of the album, ‘Current Affairs’ is a crowning moment in its profound vulnerability. While as a Lorde of 2021 purported in the divisive Solar Power her own connectedness to the whole world’s climate change crisis, an older, wiser Lorde humbly fumbles and stumbles upon her words to the feeling that her own romantic affairs are bigger than life itself. She is painfully aware that actual global current affairs are a far more understandable cause for her tears. This confession is intertwined with guilt because truly, Kim, there are people dying. But is this not all of us? Ever connected to the mounting anxiety of a world rescinding its progressive stances and which is enshrouded in the smoke of warfare. Yet, even with the greater understanding of this: one can’t help but feel their own world is so fragile and in need of care.

In so brief a moment, Lorde highlights the malleability of innocence. The synths that dominate the record, and become especially gritty in its latter tracks (with a breathtaking venture into distortion and glitch-sonics in ‘David’), round out the idea of innocence as a construct and not an inherent aspect of our natural world. It is an idea, and at times (once again, ‘David’), a currency. As listeners, we are granted the opportunity to bring the album to a close with her on a victory lap of what could only be described as Lorde‘s version of bubblegum pop (GRWM) and her awareness that she is more than the sum of her own worst moments (‘Broken Glass’, ‘If She Could See Me Now’). She artfully dodges the thin line that might otherwise have ended the album on a corny, early 2010s self-love H&M anthems note. 

To close, we return back to the note of precision: it is an accolade of its own that Virgin comes in as her shortest project to date, yet takes its listeners through the last decade of a teenage popstar of the digital age, navigating private battles, pressures and failures. She’s all grown up, but as the final refrain indicates, she is uninterested in presenting this hard-earned maturity as a final resolution. Through gritty production and her most refined lyricism, she has painted a masterpiece of a self-portrait: Lorde, imperfect Virgin (2025).