When Lorde put out her debut, Pure Heroine, in 2013, she seemed like an artist who knew herself completely. The then-16-year-old was celebrated and scrutinized as alarmingly mature for her age ("the sort of teen you forget is a teen," Rolling Stone printed at the time), an intellectual foil to her sunnier peers topping the charts. In her chilly, suburban gothic songs, Lorde sang as if she were the spokesperson of a perpetually bored and skeptical generation, leveling her eye-rolled critiques as if a loyal army stood behind her — "We don't care, we aren't caught up in your love affair," she sang on "Royals." It's that unwavering confidence that made her sophomore album, Melodrama, a major breakthrough, transforming her minimalist trap sound into romantic pop that still let her bare her teeth. "Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark," she sang on that record, wielding her pen like a dagger at age 20. Break her heart, sure, but you couldn't rattle Lorde.
The Lorde on Virgin, her fourth album and first in four years, certainly isn't as confident as she used to be. She admits as much on the tone-setting, ecstatic opener "Hammer," singing, "I'm ready to feel like I don't have the answers." That may be partly because of the self-admitted failures of her last album, Solar Power, a high-concept, low-substance release that turned the artist into a granola pop goddess, its airy songs cribbing Laurel Canyon folk, full of references to contemporary wellness culture. It was a big swing, the kind of evolutionary swerve artists are expected to make repeatedly across their careers, but Solar Power was over-moodboarded, its "sort of satire, sort of not" messaging muddled.
If Lorde doesn't have all the answers today, the reason may be simply that she's going through it. She's 28 now and thinking about her gender expression differently, proclaiming at Virgin's start that "Some days I'm a woman, some days I'm a man." She's had to pick up the pieces after the breakup of a nearly decade-long relationship. She's finally reckoning with how weird it is to grow up in front of an audience. Last year, she sang a surprisingly revealing verse on a remix of Charli xcx's "Girl, so confusing," sharing that she had been "at war with her body" and dodging hangouts to avoid being photographed. On Virgin, Lorde confronts all of these new discomforts and insecurities for a clawing, humanizing album made by an artist who, for the first time in her career, knows she doesn't have it all figured out.
"What was that?" The big, neon question illuminating Virgin's lead single, sung with a sense of exasperation, fuels the entire album. Perhaps as a course correction to Solar Power, Virgin in many ways lifts the bass-thumping mid-2010s sound of Melodrama, giving the songs an eerie time-traveling quality, though it doesn't resurrect that album's explosive spirit. Working without Jack Antonoff, her collaborator on her last two LPs, Lorde's songwriting here is more fragmented and ambiguous as she sifts through memories of the romantic, sexual and professional entanglements that have molded her into, as she sings on "Man of the Year," "someone else — someone more like myself." Drugs and sex, the latter a subject that's rarely defined Lorde's discography, permeate the entire album, filled with visions of lovers spitting in her mouth and taking a pregnancy test on the track "Clearblue."
On Solar Power, Lorde joked that she didn't want to be her listeners' savior. On Virgin she seems more pointedly aware of, and distanced from, an audience who leans into her every word. "I've been the ice, I've been the flame," she sings on the standout "Shapeshifter," her steely delivery building true dramatic tension as she addresses all the lovers she's avoidantly pushed away, while perhaps also addressing her fanbase: "I've been up on the pedestal, but tonight I just want to fall." On "If She Could See Me Now," a salty '80s synth-pop track that finds her exorcising her demons in the gym, she sneers that the industry can just find another red carpet-ready starlet, but "as for me, I'm going back to the clay." But it's not just the industry that's messed with her head. On "Favourite Daughter," a song dedicated to her poet mother, the singer recounts an early career spent "breaking my back just hoping you'll say I'm a star," over a crunchy kick drum beat that's a sibling to the one on Pure Heroine's "Team," as if Lorde is right back in her adolescence, this time unspooling the perception of her as a self-possessed star.
Not all of the soul-searching on Virgin lands, and the near-perfect pacing and tight songwriting of its first half makes the unevenness of its second more glaring. The flimsy "GRWM" suffers from some of Solar Power's more confusing instincts, as Lorde sings, "Maybe you finally know who you wanna be," as if setting up some deep insight, before answering: "a grown woman in a baby tee." How funny or not that's supposed to be isn't really clear. The dark closer "David," with its hazy, opaque images of her earliest industry memories, ends the album with a whimper. Despite chasing a more experimental streak in its songwriting, Virgin's highs are tracks like "Shapeshifter" and "Hammer," where Lorde is flexing her muscles as the woman who can turn out bangers like "Supercut." That's definitely the case with "Broken Glass," its aerobic, minimalist beat undeniably inspired by the producer A.G. Cook's work on Charli xcx's smash Brat, in which Lorde details the addictive arithmetic of an eating disorder before staging her own intervention in its sharp chorus. "I wanna punch the mirror, to make her see that this won't last," she sings. "It might be months of bad luck, but what if it's just broken glass?"
The truth is, much of Virgin plays more subdued than the strongest material in Lorde's catalog. When "What Was That?" was released as the first single, it sounded like its saturation had been dialed down — like the burning question at its core could have evoked even greater drama with some different production choices — and that approach carries through. The vocals throughout Virgin hew closer to the breathy, layered treatment on Solar Power than the full-throated delivery that animated Melodrama's wilder moments. And yet, this looser, searching tone seems to meet Lorde where she's at at this time in her life. Can we expect the person who made "Green Light" to sing about heartbreak the same way nearly a decade later? When there are revelations on Virgin — about the elasticity of her femininity, the physical strength of her body, "a recent ego death" followed by a pleasant bike ride — they're measured admissions, delivered in adult hindsight rather than the heat of discovery. They don't land like grenades in her songs the way they might have for a younger Lorde, just brushing up against the cruel realities and titanic milestones of growing up.
You could call Virgin a coming-of-age album for Lorde's late 20s. It's as if she's finally realized that to come of age is actually a messy, lifelong process — that as sturdy as you think your sense of self is, it'll keep snagging on things that unravel it. In this, Virgin joins a few other albums this year on which established women artists seek to temper their well-worn creative impulses as a means of rebirth, like Haim's breakup opus i quit, featuring the perfectionist trio finally relaxing a bit in the studio, or FKA twigs' raw EUSEXUA, on which the cerebral electronic artist finds euphoria making dance music grounded in pleasure. As familiar as Virgin might sound at first play, the Lorde here isn't — and that's a good thing. "Who's gon' love me like this?" Lorde sings on "Man of the Year," in the throes of a breakup. "Now I'm broken open?" The old Lorde would never sing that. The old Lorde would never even let us see her break.
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