The road to Virgin release day has been a long one. Not just the creation of the album itself, which Lorde, in her synesthetic state, describes as “transparent” (hence, the cover revealing an X-ray of her pelvis, complete with a zipper, belt buckle and IUD), but also in terms of the promotion. Which began, at its most concrete, at the end of April, with the making and release of the video for “What Was That.” A video that turned out to invoke the involvement of the NYPD after Lorde, via her Instagram, spontaneously invited fans to come join her in Washington Square Park. Her desire to to include them for a scene at the end of the video was briefly kiboshed by the law, but she eventually got the footage she needed (because, well, in the end, famous people tend to get what they want).
The video for “Hammer” wasn’t without its own set of challenges as well. Directed by Renell Medrano, Lorde and co. “pulled an all-nighter” in Hampstead Heath to secure the gamut of scenes required to convey the “coming of age” feeling of the song. And it really is a track that establishes the mind and body shift Lorde has undergone in the time since 2021’s Solar Power came out—an album she effectively brushed off in her Zane Lowe interview about Virgin (likely validating many fans’ opinions). It was also in said interview that Lorde confirmed “Hammer” was always going to be track one of the record. And for good reason. Because, from the moment the listener is introduced to the guttural sound (which is the word Lorde uses to describe it, in addition to saying that her sister told her it sounds like it’s coming from her womb—though others might say it has the same sound as the warped voice at the end of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River,” or even a similar connection to the sound during the opening of Addison Rae’s “Headphones On”), it establishes and defines the rough, anatomical nature of the album. Particularly in a moment during the first verse when she sings, “Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation.” And, talking of that very feminine phenomenon, Lorde told Lowe, “It was really important to me with this album to document, um, a femininity that is the way I’m a woman in the world. There’s edges to that. There’s no apologies” (something Sabrina Carpenter knows all about).
Just as there aren’t any on “What Was That,” a playful track reminiscent of “Green Light” and Lorde’s Melodrama era in general. Indeed, in trying to heal all previous versions of herself, it’s no wonder “Lordes of yore” shine through so frequently on Virgin. To that point, in mentioning, “MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up,” it brings up Lorde’s recent declaration on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert about how “guided MDMA therapy” helped her to cure her deep-seated stage fright, because it allowed her to get through to herself on a truly cellular level. Indeed, like MARINA with her shrooms during the creation of Princess of Power, Lorde mentions that while Virgin was being made, “I did a lot of psychedelics, and really tried to break myself all the way down.” To the bones, obviously. This also in part because “the experience of being in the human body is increasingly technologically intruded upon.” And Lorde additionally acknowledges that by presenting her insides on the album cover through technological means.
And yet, rather than an album that “looks to the future,” Lorde very much wanted to make something that spoke the present. To the immediacy of now, and how humanity already has all the tools it needs to save itself…if only it would actually use them. This is on a micro level as much as it is a macro one. Something Lorde can address in a hard-hitting track like “Shapeshifter,” which dissects her promiscuity as an emotional high or “quick fix.” In many ways, it’s the perfect companion piece to Lily Allen’s 2018 track, “Everything to Feel Something,” during which she explores similar patterns related to sleeping with men.
Opening with another guttural sound, the musical backing of “Shapeshifter” is a prime example of the “economy” Lorde was going for on the record, paring it down and down to the bare minimum before describing, “Chewing gum, I know [or, as Addison Rae would say, “Kick drum, chew gum”]/Don’t have the sour taste that’s in my throat/But the voice in my head says, ‘Do you have the stones?’” This phrase being something Lorde took from a flyer she noticed while walking in the East Village. As she would tell Martine Syms for Document, the phrase struck her in a different way than it was intended, remarking, “I know now it’s like, do you think you have the balls? But it gave me this feeling that there was a mysticism to it. ‘The stones’ felt like, do you have the sort of touchstones or the talismans to go there?”
It would seem that Lorde definitely does, particularly with this song, which challenges herself to ask the, er, hard question, “Everyone that I’ve slept with [side note: Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was an influence on this track]/All the pairs of hands, I’m reckless/If I’m fine without it, why can’t I stop?” Again, it echoes Allen’s sentiments on “Everything to Feel Something” when she admits, “I feel it in my gut/I’m gonna let you fuck me/I know I’m being used/I’m just another thing to do/I don’t know why I do it to myself/Giving all my worth to someone else/I don’t know why I do it to myself/I’ll do it, yeah, and I’ll do it till/I’ve tried everything, everything, everything/To feel something/But nothing.”
Lorde’s examination of why she engages in this behavior with men, however, touches on the idea that she’s constantly searching for someone to play “God” in her life. Even if, sometimes, that means playing the role herself by toying with some of these men. Hence, “When you get close enough/I’ll let down my braids [this applying to both the story of Rapunzel and Lorde’s own real-life braids during this era] and you’ll climb up/In my room we can do anything you want…/Everything I want speeding up my pulse/I don’t sleep, don’t dream at all/Give ‘em nothing personal/So I’m not affected.” Ah, the Scorpio madness of Lorde shines through at its finest here. But even Allen, a Taurus (Scorpio’s opposite, ergo complement on the zodiac wheel) makes a similar pronouncement with, “I’m at my worst when I’m alone/Can’t take the peace/So my glass is always half-empty/Someone fill it up for me/Set me free/I don’t want to fall in love/No, all I need is for someone to walk all over me/Close the door behind you please/Let me be.” Especially if a woman is in the midst of a right proper ego death.
One that led Lorde to writing the gender fluid anthem that is “Man of the Year.” And, although hesitant about it at first due to not wanting to impinge on the trans space, Lorde felt with every fiber of her being that the song was a statement she needed to make. Moreover, with regard to the abovementioned question, “Do you have the stones?” Lorde would also tell Syms, “[I saw] that as I was also coming into my masculinity a bit more.” And that’s quite apparent in lyrics like, “Now I go ‘bout my day, riding it like a wave/Playing it any way I want/Swish mouthwash, jerk off.” In other words, acting in the same liberated, “dick-swinging” fashion that men always get to.
After a hymn about embracing her masculine side, it’s only natural that Lorde would shift back to her feminine role as the “Favourite Daughter.” And even though it’s a track about her relationship with her mother, Lorde realized, “As much as it’s about my mom… I felt that I was also singing to an audience… there’s been this dynamic of wanting so badly to be loved and to kind of get this approval and to be the favorite.” Over the years, Lorde has strayed further and further away from being the type of commercially successful singer who might get that sense of approval and being “the favorite” (*cough cough* Taylor Swift). And yet, there’s still some innate part of her that seeks to be the kind of “best” that will receive the most recognition. A feeling that began, as it does for most children, by seeking the approval of her parents. Especially her mother, who was open to and supportive of Lorde’s musical pursuits.
So it is that Lorde recalls, “I was a singer/You were my fan/When no one gave a damn/It was you in the dark/Scared of your anger/In love with your whim/Some notes I don’t hit/But I don’t give up.” Thankfully, for her fans beyond Sonja Yelich, she kept persevering. And, because of that combined determination and maternal support, “Now every day the plane takes off/And every night the room fills up with/People who are convinced I’m not/Just some kid fakin’ it for your love.” The sense of imposter syndrome conveyed during lyrical moments like these is in contrast to the markedly upbeat tone of the music (upbeat in a different way than “What Was That”), which is in keeping with the childlike part of herself that Lorde gets in touch with on this song.
Coming to terms with the idea that she’s, in a sense, replaced approval-seeking from her mother for approval-seeking from fans and critics, Lorde chirps, ‘Cause I’m an actress/All of the medals I won for ya/Breaking my back just to be your favourite daughter/Everywhere I run, I’m always runnin’ to ya/Breaking my back just hoping you’ll say I’m a star” (or, to quote Pearl, “Please, I’m a star!”). Lorde’s reliance on her mother for emotional support and validation also shows up in “Current Affairs,” among the rawest songs of Virgin (which is saying a lot). In it, there is a certain callback to Melodrama’s “Liability” in that Lorde talks about a relationship she has with someone being doomed because of the inevitable scrutiny it will get from the public.
So it is that she brings the Pam and Tommy sex tape into it with the verse, “All alone in my room/Watching the tape of their honeymoon/On the boat, it was pure and true/Then the film came out/Hope that we can ignore/Voices we hear through the open door/Would you dive to the ocean floor/Just to take my pearl?” For what would an album called Virgin be without a bit of innuendo? To assist with that is Dexta Daps, whose voice is incorporated via the lyrics to his 2014 hit, “Morning Love.” Specifically, “Girl, your pussy good, it grip me good a me fi tell you.”
Elsewhere on the sexually charged front, Lorde says, “He spit in my mouth like/He’s saying a prayer/But now I’m crying on the phone/Swearing nothing’s wrong.” But of course it is. Because her relationship with another person, no matter what stage it’s in, will always be subject to examination. Yet this fear of being examined is something she had to let go of in order to make the candid album that she wanted to. A totally unvarnished presentation that, as she said, “grapples with what is public, what is private?” For, on the one hand, she wants to be honest and, yes, transparent, but on the other, she knows that being so free with her emotions and actions puts her at risk in the same way as Pam and Tommy. They, too, felt free enough to make a sex tape like no one would ever watch it, and look what happened—the whole world did. But with Virgin, Lorde is willing to go more “stripped” than ever before, looking to artists like Emin and Syms for the courage—the “stones”—to expose herself in the name of her art. And in the name of finding some semblance of peace (though she’s wont to ask Lowe at the end of their interview, “At what cost?”).
Something that’s challenging for many a woman to find, especially if they’re briefly cursed with a pregnancy scare. And yes, it is a curse that weighs most heavily upon the woman’s body, psychologically and physically (if she does turn out to be “with child”). Enter “Clearblue” (named as such in honor of the pregnancy test brand—and likely as a nod to the color palette of her album), a practically a capella track that finds Lorde wrestling with the highs and lows of a sexual encounter. This immediately apparent in the single opening line, “After the ecstasy, testing for pregnancy, praying in MP3.” She then plays into the earlier mentioned notion of how technology has increasingly encroached upon the human body by conceding, “I’m scared to let you see into the whole machine, leave it all on the field/Your metal detector hits my precious treasure [yes, more innuendo], I’m nobody’s daughter [a sentiment in direct contrast to “Favourite Daughter]/Yeah, baby, I’m free, I’m free/Free, I’m free.” That is, unless the pregnancy test turns out to be positive. Though maybe, from Lorde’s perspective, it might all be worth it for that night of ephemeral pleasure. One that she rehashes in a way that only Lorde could (and would) by singing, “I rode you until I cried” and “But deep in my matter, you’re changing my patterns/Your helix is right through me/Bars on my windows, you bust them wide open [this “busting wide open” also being another innuendo while simultaneously referring back to the “breaking open” that led to her gender-broadening on “Man of the Year”]/‘Til clearness is all I see.”
That clarity extending to “GRWM,” which serves as an abbreviation for “Grown Woman.” A title that Lorde eventually realizes she still doesn’t quite feel like she embodies. Even if she does her best to do “grown woman” things like having casual sex. Once more alluded to in the opening verse, “Soap, washing him off my chest/Keeping it light, not overthinking it/Jumping from stone to stone [the stones again] in the riverbed, I guess.” The song then offers an industrial-sounding backing track complemented by softer electropop sounds as Lorde muses, “Since ‘96, been looking for a grown woman/A grown woman/Pink galaxy left undressed/2009 me’d be so impressed/Back when the stolen spirits went straight to the head/Maybe you’ll finally know who you wanna be/A grown woman in a baby tee.” A phrase that reminds one of Britney Spears’ “Brave New Girl” lyrics, “He said, ‘You look real cute with your low-ride jeans and your pink little baby tee.’” And yes, in turn, it reminds that Spears’ “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” is also more and more omnipresent within the psyches of theoretically “grown women” (hear also: MARINA’s “Adult Girl”).
Reconciling her teen girl self with her present-day self continues, in its way, on “Broken Glass” (not to be confused with Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” or even Spears’ “Shattered Glass”). This being the song Lorde said she had the most difficulty with finishing. After all, it’s not easy to revisit the darkest days of one’s eating disorder. But that’s precisely what Lorde does (and with the same earnest candor as Tove Lo, a fellow Scorpio, on “Grapefruit”). With the phrase “broken glass” referring to a mirror, Lorde already alluded to her body dysmorphic ways in the “What Was That” line, “I cover up all the mirrors/I can’t see myself yet.” And, of course, her acknowledgement of disordered eating and body dysmorphia was highly present on the remix of “Girl, so confusing” (and yes, Lorde credits Charli XCX and Brat with upping her game on the lyrical and musical content of Virgin). On it, she delivers the no holds barred verse, “I was so lost in my head/And scared to be in your pictures/‘Cause for the last couple years/I’ve been at war with my body/I tried to starve myself thinner/And then I gained all the weight back/I was trapped in the hatred.”
A self-hatred she conveys with unbridled honesty in the lyrics of “Broken Glass,” including a verse that unpacks how this form of self-hatred can be interpreted as self-love by the person engaging in the behavior. Thus, Lorde sings, “When I cry myself to sleep about that/Cheat about that/Get in too deep about that/When I sweat hours a week about that/Competе about that/Lettin’ her treat mе like that/I think that it’s love.”
At the beginning of the song, she also outright pronounces, “Mystique is dead.” While it might refer to the secrecy she maintained in terms of how she “looked so good” all the time, there’s also an element of it that pertains to her retreat from “civilization” after Melodrama came out. Something she talked about with Jake Shane on Therapuss when she said that the pressures that came with that success ultimately led her to making the “anti-Lorde” record, Solar Power. Of which she says, “I love Solar Power so much… [she didn’t put it quite the same way to Lowe] but I think it showed me that you sort of just have no choice but to just be who you’re supposed to be. [Making that album made me see], ‘Actually I don’t think this is me.’ I’m this person who’s meant to make these, like, bangers that fuck us all up… I don’t think I’m supposed to vibe out.” Just another way in which Lorde has cut to the core of herself thanks to all her psychoactive drug use.
And, talking of psychoactive drugs, Lorde also told Lowe that she was slightly stoned on the steps of her Airbnb in London when she first started writing “If She Could See Me Now,” the second to last track of the album. As she was typing out some of the lyrics on her phone, a group of youths (further adding to the stereotype of how scary London teenagers are) went by on a Lime and tried to steal her phone out of her hand. Mercifully, Lorde held onto it. Which plays into the “tough broad” image she delineates in the initial verse, “‘Cause I’m a mystic, I swim in waters/That would drown so many other bitches/Got me lifted, feelin’ so gifted.” That latter line also sampling (musically and lyrically) from Baby Bash and Frankie J’s 2003 hit, “Suga Suga.” Another curveball from Lorde, like the incorporation of Dexta Daps into “Current Affairs.”
Yet, despite the hip-hop sampling, overall, “If She Could See Me Now” is the most “rock” of the tracks from Virgin. Perhaps it needs to be with such “claws out” bars as, “Baby/Whenever you’d break me/I’d watch it happen, like an angel looking down/It made me a woman, being hurt like that/I can feel, don’t need fantasy/Oh God, if she could see me now.” This being yet another reference to a Lorde of the past (the video for “Secrets from a Girl [Who’s Seen it All]” establishing this “past selves” motif within her work). A more vulnerable, naïve and underestimated Lorde who would fall prey to, say, an older music executive. One that warrants the mocking chorus (in a vain that recalls Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire”), “Hope you find another starlet/Another camera, another red carpet/As for me, I’m going back to the clay.” A lyric that provides the perfect tie-in to the gut-wrenching finale, “David.”
The accusing (we’re talking even more biting than “All Too Well” [Taylor’s Version]) nature of the song shines through immediately, with Lorde demanding, “Was I just someone to dominate?/Worthy opponent, flint to my blade, now we’re playing with shadows.” In this regard, the song title refers to another David besides Michelangelo’s—the David of David and Goliath (others still will speculate that titling the song after a man’s name is further proof that it’s about Lorde’s “ultimate” ex, Justin Warren). And the Goliath who dominated her in her youth only did so because he knew it would be easy. That young women “don’t know any better” (or, as Rodrigo would say, “Went for me, and not her/‘Cause girls your age know better”). Which is why Lorde can presently come to terms with how, “I made you God ‘cause it was all that I knew how to do.”
Evoking that time in her life, Lorde gets deeply personal (but then, “deeply personal” is the alternate title of Virgin) with the lines, “At the Sunset Tower, you said, ‘Open your mouth’/I did [something about this eliciting the image of the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid taking Ariel’s voice]/And what came spilling out that day was the truth/If I’d had virginity, I would have given that too.” As for this mention of the word that the album derives its name from, it’s the only time it gets used in the “conventional” sense. For Lorde’s intent with the word stemmed from a more archaic meaning, which she revealed in an Instagram story with an excerpt that read, “There is also evidence that the word ‘virgin’ derived from the combination of Latin words ‘vir-’ (for man, as in ‘virile’) and ‘-gyne’ (for woman, as in ‘gynecology’)—a man-woman or androgynous person.” Thus, “virgin,” in this sense, addresses how she has “broken open,” gender-wise. And this is part of the reason why, to borrow from Ms. Barch in Daria (borrowing from Scarlett O’Hara), Lorde effectively arrives at the revelation, “As God is my witness, I will never pull a man’s weight again!” Unless it’s the weight of herself, she being her own man now.
But before achieving that level of self-assurance, Lorde had to go over all the “unpleasant” questions in her mind: “Why do we run to the ones we do?/I don’t belong to anyone [more MARINA correlations, as she said the same thing on “How to Be a Heartbreaker”]/Oh, dark day/Was I just young blood to get on tape?/‘Cause you dimed me out when it got hard/Uppercut to the throat, I was off-guard/Pure heroine [that acerbic nod to her debut] mistaken for featherweight/But what came spilling out that day was the truth/And once I could sing again, I swore I’d never lеt/Let myself sing again for you.”
No, no. This time, Lorde is singing entirely for herself. And in so doing, tapping into the intense emotions of her listeners with her specificity (for, as it is said, there is often a general resonance in the specific). As for those who might posit that the album is so short in duration (her shortest to date, with her previous two clocking in at over forty minutes) because it’s too “heavy” to handle otherwise, at a taut (or “tighter than a virgin”) thirty-five minutes, Lorde insists this is all the time she wants to take up from people. That she’s already lucky enough that anyone would take any amount of time out of their day for her because, well, there’s already so much to absorb. A very Lorde takeaway. As are the heart-rending repeated lines of the outro, “Am I ever gonna love again?” Considering the openness and honesty with which Lorde has approached herself on this record, “signs point to yes.”
