Review: Virgin
Lorde's fourth studio album delivers a robust fragility that only comes with the clarity and confusion of rebirth.
Lorde returns with her fourth studio album, Virgin. She takes about four years between albums, giving herself time to live, process, create, and roll out her albums. And you can hear it. Virgin is a massive departure from her third album Solar Power, which leans into solace and tranquility that can only come from isolation and the ocean. It’s acoustic, it’s softer, it wavy. But since its release, she went through a break up, eating disorder, and gender revelations. So Lorde fished her phone out of the sea, called up Jim-e Stack, and leaned into this confusing new sense of self to create Virgin.
Virgin is a rebirth, but by no means does Lorde have it all figured out. She’s okay with not knowing, but she’s coming from a place of clarity. There’s confusion in clarity, there’s clarity in confusion, and so on. We get a lot of severely insightful questions, like “Why’d you have to dream so big?” (Favorite Daughter), “How’d I shift shape like that?” (Shapeshifter), “Who’s gonna love me like this?” (Man Of The Year), and much much more. But we also get a lot of slogans that feel both confident and shaky, such as “A grown woman in a baby tee” (GRWM), “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man” (Hammer), “'Cause I'm a mystic, I swim in waters that would drown so many other bitches” (If She Could See Me Now). Regardless, she’s finding strength in not knowing everything, and finding a confidence built not on stability, but resilience.
She told Zane Lowe that she “felt quite fragile [while making this album]. But the music is very robust in a lot of ways. There’s real heft to it.” Sonically, it's huge. Like the post-chorus on “Hammer,” or the climax of the album during the second chorus of “David,” which feels like the shards of broken glass collecting and reflecting light. It’s all drums, all rhythm. The robust fragility can be heard in many ways. Maybe she uses the huge sounds to protect her fragility. Maybe her fragility feels powerful, and therefore she needs these powerful sounds to match it. Maybe she needs a sturdy vessel to carry her fragility.
One of the most interesting relationships on this album is between human and machine. The whole album really sounds like it came from a machine; I don’t feel like I am in a room listening to a band, I feel like I am in Lorde's computer. She’s making sense of her humanness through these really technological, metallic sounds. Even when we get a clear instrument, like the cello on “Shapeshifter,” the guitar on “Current Affairs,” or any of the drums ever, music technology has been heavily imposed on it. As if whatever boundaries have existed between human, tool, instrument, and technology have not been sufficient for Lorde. And with her intervention, we understand the machine as being much more vulnerable than we’ve been giving it credit for.
But the center issue on this album is bodies. She understands the poetic vulgarity of bodies, and isn’t afraid to show us. What they are, how we use them, how we feel about them, how they make us feel. Embodiment. If I think about bodies for too long I honestly get nauseous. From what I’ve gathered, Lorde feels that way too, or at least has at some point. But she’s confronting it head on, and presents us with the artistic multiplicities in bodies. Her lyrics are packed with crying, singing, fucking, eating, loving, hating, getting her ears pierced. We see it in her movements, ranging from the revelatory sand dancing in the “Man Of The Year” music video, to the skirt-flowing field running in the “Hammer” music video. We get it in her vocals, which feature large breaths, wails, sweet head voices, and little rasps. Whatever she’s feeling in her body, she is able to translate it into something else. Something that’s not insular to her and her body, but released to the world for us and our bodies.
For everything I can say about this album, for how sophisticated, raw, worked, felt, embodied and poetic it is, I am still not really reaching for it. I will chalk this up to personal taste. To a deep, deep bias I carry for Pure Heroine, the first album I listened to from front to back. To Melodrama, which dropped on my 16th birthday. There is quite literally nothing she could possibly do that would top that. I am so sorry Ella. It probably just has to grow on me. I am just a grown woman in a baby tee after all.