When Lorde emerged in 2013 with her global hit “Royals,” there was much about her musical talents that belied her 16 years. One thing that didn’t was her sense of certainty in her critiques of the elites and the way we idolize them. Her debut album, Pure Heroine, was similarly filled with songs that exuded a fundamentally teenage assuredness about what’s right and wrong in mass culture.
As she’s gotten older, Lorde has turned her focus toward the messy emotions of young adulthood, on 2017’s Melodrama, and declaring authoritatively on the opening track of 2021’s Solar Power that “if you’re looking for a savior, that’s not me.” Her fourth album, Virgin, sees her embracing uncertainty even more unapologetically.
The album’s first track, “Hammer,” opens with a hesitancy—“I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers”—that it doesn’t care to resolve, while lead single “What Was That?” lingers in the confounding aftermath of a breakup. The titular question of the latter is so all-encompassing that it’s effectively unanswerable. So, it’s no surprise that even after Lorde spends three-and-a-half minutes excavating old memories, she still ends up asking the same question at the song’s end.
Lorde does observe her feelings with greater emotional clarity on “Favourite Daughter,” an ode to her mother. The track features some of Virgin’s most incisive lyrics, beginning with the moving admission that “I was a singer/You were my fan/When no one gave a damn.” Throughout the song, Lorde speaks to sacrificing yourself in aid of a loved one (“Breaking my back to carry the weight of your heart”) and how old anxieties can linger through adulthood (“There’s a room I can’t go in/I break in, I still can’t find you”).
While the lyrics of “Favourite Daughter” are striking, intense, and heart-rendering, they’re backdropped by plodding programmed drums and low-key synths that feel incongruous. And compared to the present-tense immediacy of, say, “Green Light,” too much of “What Was That?” happens in the past. As such, the song, like many on Virgin, fails to provoke a visceral reaction. Elsewhere, “Hammer” flattens the issue of gender fluidity to the uncharacteristically blunt declaration that “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.”
But Virgin is still a step in the right direction for Lorde. She uses her singular vocals to greater effect here than on Solar Power, rekindling the vocal dynamism that makes Melodrama so riveting. Her voice moves from a pained rasp during the refrain of “Man of the Year” to the breathy whispers of “Shapeshifter” to the semi-rapped delivery of “If She Could See Me Now.”
When the album’s production, vocals, and lyrics are in perfect harmony, the results are sublime. It’s there toward the end of “Man of the Year,” when Lorde cathartically describes “How I hope that I’m remembered” over a clatter of programmed drums and synths, and on “Shapeshifter,” whose bridge, for its layered synth-pop and musings on a relationship in flux, calls to mind Taylor Swift. In the end, though, it’s in the gray areas that Lorde seems to thrive.
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