GRWL (Get Ready With Lorde)

The New Zealand singer’s fourth album, ‘Virgin’, is a transitional album mistakenly marketed as a comeback. Though its individual strands don't often cohere, they remain fascinating.

It began, as it so often does these days, with a TikTok. The woman who once declared, rather infamously, that she felt her ‘brain degrading’ when she used the app, would post her first video to a sea of adoring millions in early April. The video was simple in concept – Lorde ran through what seemed to be Washington Square Park while a snippet of an upcoming single played – yet its mere existence was disorienting (not to mention the motion sickness-inducing cinematography). Lorde hadn’t been radio silent in the four years since her last record, Solar Power, but new music would undoubtedly expand upon the mini-revelations of last year’s ‘Girl, so confusing’ remix, where she alluded to an eating disorder at the nadir of her mental health journey. Whatever Lorde released would likely return her to the confessional, poetic writing we’d come to know her for – a cause for celebration if I ever heard one. (Plus, the song seemed to have synths! Melodrama part two, anyone?)

What would follow the TikTok over the next two months would be an exhaustive, exhausting rollout for her fourth album – Virgin – whose confusing marketing belies a rather simple product. For all the interviews, weird revelations, stripping and pop-up concerts, Virgin is, at its core, a diary: uncompromisingly direct, structured in form yet messy in execution, and altogether fascinating to dissect. The worlds and themes from which Lorde pulls are wide-ranging and sometimes compelling, but too frequently her lyricism lacks the incisiveness required to tackle such subjects. As a whole, Virgin is a collage of feeling, a kaleidoscope of lived experiences and traumas distilled into a slender thirty-four minutes, and though that inevitably means that some tracks pass by like fleeting thoughts, there are some real gems in here.

The trouble is, searching for the gems becomes a task when you realise that, for perhaps the first time in Lorde’s career, there are skips. (No, I’m not having the Solar Power debate now.) There are good ideas only carried halfway, as though the nakedly diaristic qualities of each song suffice. (They don’t.) ‘What Was That’ remains baffling, a half-remembered memory smothered beneath a humid yet bloodless production. ‘Broken Glass’ is similarly tepid, and though its lyrics are indelibly heart-wrenching – ‘I spent my summer getting lost in math’ is such a uniquely banal, devastating way to describe disordered eating – it’s not married to the blunt production it seems to yearn for. ‘Favourite Daughter’, like ‘Broken Glass’, could serve to have its melody developed – a shame, considering the former’s lyrics could have feasibly soundtracked many a mother-daughter TikTok slideshow had it been more compositionally memorable.

Lorde for Virgin

In other places, though, the lyrics prove the problem. ‘Shapeshifter’, with its intense, crescendoing breakbeats and near-whispered chorus, could contend for a new classic in Lorde’s canon were its chorus more imaginative – it’s hard to latch onto any one line when they all hold equal weight. ‘Man of the Year’, like ‘What Was That’, meanders lyrically, in spite of beautifully spare licks of guitar that later crash into cracklingly alive drum machines. The most experimental song of the set, ‘Clearblue’, is a stunning number featuring no instrumentation save for Lorde’s vocodered crooning, à la ‘Hide and Seek’. At some points, it has some of the best lines of her career (I’ll be thinking about ‘I rode you ‘til I cried’ for years); at other junctures, she settles for axiomatic conclusions and clichés (‘Oh, where did it go / Wish I kept the Clearblue’ – as though she doesn’t trust her listener to have made that assumption on their own).

In this way, ‘Clearblue’ is Virgin in microcosm: some excellent ideas, some misguided or undeveloped threads, tied to production that, depending on who you ask, is either too weird or a stroke of genius. It’s interesting, then, that she’s marketed this as a sharp pivot-turn from Solar Power, because each record bears more than a passing resemblance to the other. Both are revealing in different, sometimes unflattering ways, and both have production that’s likely to jar the casual listener coming from ‘Ribs’. Virgin, though – more than any other Lorde record – is truly insular; for all my critiques about Lorde selling her work as her most authentic each time, this one truly is, for better and for worse. Though the imagery on occasion borders on downright grim (there’s a spit reference I could’ve done without), Virgin is unmistakably a Lorde album.

I mean that in a good way, too, because when the production and lyricism jell, Lorde – as she usually does – fires on all cylinders. ‘If She Could See Me Now’ is a curious quasi-power ballad experiment, filtered through acidic synths that marry perfectly to Lorde’s anguished vocal performance; though, like many songs on the tracklist, its emotional impact would be exacerbated by a third chorus, its lyrical content – ‘Yesterday, I lifted your body weight’ – devastates. ‘Current Affairs’ is similarly annihilating, an overcast ballad that updates the ‘I hate the headlines’ lyric from eight years ago to reflect our broader sense of desensitisation to Global Atrocities. (I don’t even hate the sample!)

Lorde in the video for ‘Man of the Year’

Virgin’s two unmistakably excellent songs, though, are its bookends. Opener ‘Hammer’ ignites with big-city colour, synth flurries and hearty booms, offering a thesis statement for the whole record: “I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers.” It’s no ‘Green Light’, but it gets close. Meanwhile, Virgin’s coda, ‘David’, might be one of the finest things Lorde’s put her name on to date. It’s a blistering epic that never quite reaches three-and-a-half minutes, graduating from a spare, spotlit verse to an all-consuming final stretch. “Was I just someone to dominate?”, she begs to know, standing up to her addressee’s oppressive behaviour before succumbing to it: “If I had virginity I would’ve given that too.” For the first time on the whole record, it feels like the naked, raw experience Virgin was marketed as is finally delivered on, and the effects are breathtaking as the song reaches an almost uncomfortably intense climax. Then Virgin is over, and you wish the whole album had been that bracingly incisive.

7/10

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