Initially making a significant impact on the music world in 2013 with her debut album, Pure Heroine, Lorde has consistently grown as a singer and songwriter since then.
Only sixteen years old at that time when singles like “Royals” were lighting up charts, 2017’s Melodrama and 2021’s Solar Power were equally as compelling. Jump forward to the present day, Lorde’s fourth studio album, Virgin, released on June 27th through Republic Records, marks a significant shift in both sound and subject matter.
Departing from the glossy gloom of her previous collaborations, Lorde once again co-produces, but this time with Jim-E Stack, Dan Nigro, and Buddy Ross, drawing in additional production assistance from Dev Hynes, Fabiana Palladino, Andrew Aged, and Justin Vernon. The result is a raw, fresh, body-forward, and emotionally vulnerable album that trades stadium-ready Pop for intimate, genre-blurring experimentation that will have your hair standing and your heartstrings taut.
Simply put, the production throughout Virgin is deliberately fragmented. Jim-E Stack lays a foundation of synthetic percussion, abstracted bass lines, and ambient textures, while Buddy Ross and Dan Nigro close out the arrangements with piano, guitar, and synth layers. Justin Vernon adds bass and guitar on the closing track, and Dev Hynes contributes cello and harmonic textures. The sound isn’t polished; it’s tangible and lived-in, shifting to match the massive turbulence of the themes permeating throughout the record.
At just over 34 minutes, Virgin plays like a personal manifesto, touching on gender, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and familial pressure with an honest specificity that can feel almost intrusive in its truth. The songs do not follow traditional Pop cookie-cutter structures, often unraveling into unexpected textures or spoken-word asides. However, that unpredictability is part of the emotional logic and power that flows into the veins of listeners.
Eleven songs in total, one standout is “Hammer,” the album’s opener. It lurches into focus with percussive synths and chopped rhythms, laying the groundwork for a narrative about urban intensity and identity instability. Lorde’s vocal delivery is sharp, almost confrontational, as she shifts through personas and physical metaphors. The track feels like a scene from a late night in the city—moody, alluring, full of potential, as well as danger.
Additionally, “Man of the Year” is the most quietly devastating moment on the record. Written after attending a men’s fashion event, the song reflects on Lorde’s relationship with gender presentation and power. The instrumentation is sparse, just cello, synth, and a soft kick—leaving space for the lyrics to slice through. It is a song about reclaiming space in a world that codes identity in such binary terms, and Lorde sings it with a bruised dignity that stamps the song into memory.
This is while “Favourite Daughter” plunges into generational dynamics and maternal expectation. It is built around a rolling, but slow climb, beginning in whispered, delicate vocals over ambient keys before rising into a hurricane of layered harmonies and distorted drums. The track is one of the emotional cores of Virgin, turning the tensions of family into something mythic, even operatic. There is no easy resolution, just a willingness to sit in the aching pain of trying to be good enough.
Later on in the album, “Clearblue” peels everything away. It is almost entirely a cappella, with layered vocoder harmonies forming a fragile structure around Lorde’s voice. The song captures a moment of suspended time, waiting for a pregnancy test to render its verdict, and uses that pause to navigate themes of choice, freedom, and the visceral nature of the female body. It is haunting in its minimalism and ranks high among the boldest compositions of Lorde’s career.
Across Virgin Lorde reclaims mess as a mode of expression. There are no neat arcs, no cathartic crescendos to wrap things up. Instead, she leans into the uncomfortable middle ground, songs that begin one way and slowly melt away, lyrics that offer no answers. The production mirrors this disarray, at times abrasive or almost too quiet, as if daring listeners to come closer, to sink deeper.
Overall, this is not a commercial Pop album. It is more intimate, more physically rooted, and more narratively disjointed than anything Lorde has released before. Where Melodrama wrapped chaos in grandiosity and Solar Power looked outward for serenity, Virgin turns inward–deep into the body, into memory, into moods that refuse to resolve themselves. The result is challenging, rewarding, and wholly unlike anything else in Pop right now.
Lorde is not asking to be liked here, but she certainly forces listeners to come to no other conclusion. Through the massive originality and creativity that buoy her already stratospheric ability to play, like a harp, the emotional strings of the human condition, Lorde pushes us to examine not only the world around us, but also the world that resides only within.
Virgin is a triumph and a frontrunner for the best Pop record of the year. A must-listen for the summer too, Cryptic Rock.com gives the new Lorde album 4.5 out of 5 stars.
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