Since the release of Pure Heroine over a decade ago, Lorde has established a steady rhythm for herself: one album, once every four years. Yet each time we grow impatient, watching a pot we know isn’t ready to boil, because a new Lorde album isn’t just a collection of new music from a beloved artist—it’s the last four years of her life in miniature, a game of Where in the World is Ella Yelich-O’Connor? No matter the cut and contour of the songs, the answer is always fascinating.
At just 35 minutes, Virgin is the shortest Lorde album and the most dense with her. It is—as all its predecessors have been—a record about growing up, fitfully, while dragging the cocoon of youth behind you. It’s also frequently, ravenously horny. Working with Jim-E Stack, who produced last year’s world-stopping “Girl, So Confusing” remix, Lorde casts her scope onto the kind of thorny subject matter rarely discussed outside of a therapist’s office: generational trauma, pregnancy tests, dysmorphia, dysphoria, sexual dominance and submission. As Virgin traverses fairytales, New York City, the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape, and a sample of Dexta Daps’ dancehall hit “Morning Love,” an artist long touted as wise beyond her years comes to terms with how much she still doesn’t know. Here are five takeaways from the album.
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Earlier this week, Lorde was a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where she discussed how MDMA therapy helped her overcome “the most horrific stage fright.” She’d previously defined each of her studio albums by a particular drug—alcohol for Pure Heroine, molly for Melodrama, and weed for Solar Power—but Virgin, while it’s far from a “getting sober” record, presents a shifting relationship to mood-altering substances. The drunken car-crash fantasies of “Homemade Dynamite” have given way to breezy, post-ego death bike rides on “Man of the Year,” and Lorde’s busy accounting for all the other compulsions that can come to run our lives: sex, the internet, our relationships to our bodies, our relationships to our mothers. Then again, the “best cigarette of my life” line in “What Was That” begs the question: Is Virgin actually her nicotine album?
A Place in the City
If you weren’t already aware, Lorde lives in New York City now, and the transplant has made her adopted home a central fixture of the Virgin rollout. She debuted lead single “What Was That” at an impromptu concert in Washington Square Park, and peppers her lyrics with further placemarks throughout the album. Washington Square gets another shoutout (“The mist from the fountain is kissing my neck”) on “Hammer,” as does Magic Jewelry on Canal Street, where Lorde allegedly goes to get her ears pierced and aura photographed. “In the city, I hear the voices of the ancients, they’re calling for us,” she sings on “If She Could See Me Now,” “Hear their horses running up Prince Street.” The “Man of the Year” music video even takes place in a recreation of Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room, which has occupied the same SoHo loft since 1977.
