Lorde Strips Down to Start Over

Lorde is modern pop’s biggest demystifier, and in addition its biggest mystic. This contradiction has animated her music from the start. “We aren’t caught up in your love affair,” she declared in 2013’s “Royals,” taking a defiant stance in opposition to the world of pop-culture glamour—solely to spend the remainder of her début album making her personal inverted model of that very same world, an countless Vevo of the thoughts, populated by partying teen-agers “livin’ in ruins of a palace inside my desires.” On the album “Photo voltaic Energy,” which was launched in 2021, she set her sights on New Age wellness tradition with the identical combination of mistrust and sympathy, one second making enjoyable of an acquaintance for exchanging exhausting medication for yoga, the following singing about her personal powers of manifestation: “I could make something actual.” Though her lithe voice and melodic sensibility have set the agenda for a lot alternative-leaning pop music of the previous decade and a half—virtually creating the entire class—it’s above all this capability to slide between enchantment and disenchantment, breaking down myths and changing them with new ones, that units Lorde aside.On “Virgin,” her fourth and newest album, Lorde examines the myths that make up her id. This introspection comes after a sequence of ordeals: the tip of the singer’s longest relationship, an consuming dysfunction, a interval of inventive recalibration after releasing “Photo voltaic Energy,” her first album that didn’t seismically shift the sector of pop music. Lorde touched on a few of this materials in “Woman, so complicated that includes lorde,” the Charli XCX frenemy-reconciliation anthem she sang on in 2024, rattling off a fevered record of insecurities over a harsh, clanging beat. “Virgin” begins off someplace stiller, after the metallic noise has subsided.“I may need been born once more / I’m able to really feel like I don’t have the solutions,” she sings on the opening observe, “Hammer,” earlier than the track erupts right into a distorted squelch, pulsing like a warmth wave burning off mist. “Now we wake from a dream,” she intones on “What Was That,” a breakup track that deflates proper once you count on it to swell, culminating within the title’s query, posed however by no means answered. These might be statements of triumph, however, in Lorde’s palms, they really feel extra ambiguous: the might-have-been renders her rebirth unsure. The query of the dream’s content material lingers, the foghorn hoot of a lone distant synth barely slicing by.In a discography as slim as Lorde’s, it’s straightforward to search out patterns. You can say that “Pure Heroine” (2013) and “Photo voltaic Energy” are life-style data: the previous in regards to the sleazy good-time visions of late aughts and early-twenty-tens pop, the latter in regards to the singer’s ambivalence towards what she known as on the time her “hippie housewife” life in California. “Melodrama,” her 2017 document, is extra of a relationship album, and “Virgin” follows go well with, in a means. The sharply noticed songs spin by misplaced love, discovered lust, household trauma, gender exploration.With “Virgin,” Lorde marks a decided return to New York—town the place, years earlier, she recorded a lot of “Melodrama” on the residence of Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff, Dunham’s boyfriend and the album’s producer. Within the lead-up to “Virgin,” Lorde held an impromptu live performance at Washington Sq. Park, threw a live-streamed listening celebration on the tiny venue Child’s All Proper, and appeared courtside at a Knicks playoff recreation in royal blue; on the album, she name-checks Canal Avenue and recounts watching an eclipse in “the park.” She has spoken of the intervening years, and “Photo voltaic Energy,” as a retreat: “Me type of disappearing and being all wafty and on the seaside, I used to be simply, like, ‘Really, I don’t suppose that is me.’ I simply am this one who’s meant to make these bangers that fuck us all up.” When the album’s first single, “What Was That,” dropped, her followers eagerly predicted a return to type, connecting the observe’s photos—the reminiscence of MDMA-fuelled nights with a lover, smoking the most effective cigarette of her life—to scenes from songs akin to “Inexperienced Gentle,” through which she exhorts a reticent lover to recollect “how we kissed after we danced on the light-up ground.”“What Was That,” although, will not be precisely a banger. Like many of the songs on the album, it’s extra of a sly anti-banger, perpetually withholding the second of fist-pumping catharsis. The place “Melodrama” paired confessional writing with Antonoff’s lush, extravagant manufacturing—piling synths and guitars on each track till introspection acquired the pressure of a 4-D film—“Virgin” is thematically expansive but sonically trim. Jim-E Stack, Lorde’s predominant collaborator on the document (and rumored new boyfriend), has been quietly shaping a brand new low-key sound for progressive pop over the previous a number of years, lending hushed focus to releases by Bon Iver, Caroline Polachek, Gracie Abrams, and others. Right here he strips away the washy reverb and neon keyboard glow of the Antonoff period and emphasizes exhausting, dry drums and spare synths that go away loads of house for the vocals. It’s a minimalist foil to A. G. Prepare dinner’s in-the-red sound on Charli’s “Brat,” although the 2 producers share an affinity for uncluttered preparations and abrasive synth textures; at instances, “Virgin” sounds a bit of like “Brat” heard from the following room over, or recalled on a groggy morning after. It’s a becoming sound for an album about, amongst different issues, the will to return to zero, sloughing off extra and rising clear.Like all of Lorde’s music, “Virgin” can be in regards to the relationship between the sensuous world of style and contact and the realm of photos, personas, façades. Though the title of the observe “GRWM” is a nod to the favored “prepare with me” TikTok style through which creators share their magnificence routines, the track itself traces the extra intimate strategy of transitioning from one self to a different, a physique getting into and out of idealized variations of itself, like so many outfits. It comprises a few of her frankest writing about intercourse and its mundane aftermath: “Cleaning soap, washing him off my chest,” she sings, every syllable punctuated with a synth stab. The refrain repurposes the title’s acronym as a unique form of aspirational picture, a judgment delivered to oneself within the mirror: “Woman’s a grown lady”—but additionally, later, “been in search of a grown lady” after which, within the outro, “I can’t discover a grown lady.” There isn’t any bitterness or cynicism on this development, only a stressed questing. The place the teen-age Lorde may need seized on this scene as an opportunity to decry a shallow, image-obsessed tradition, right here she merely takes stock of herself—chipped tooth, the “pink galaxy” of pimples—whereas trying ahead. She was a lot older then; she’s youthful than that now.Trying ahead, glancing again, catching a glimpse of herself on a lover’s chain: “Virgin” is a corridor of mirrors, each providing a partial and probably distorted view. Generally the mirror exhibits the physique at its most abject, striving and struggling. “Mirror, mirror, on his shirt / I see a scorching mess in an vintage skirt,” Lorde drawls in her signature spoken-word voice on “Shapeshifter.” “Damaged Glass,” the document’s most viscerally introspective track, goes additional, addressing the singer’s previous self within the throes of an consuming dysfunction. On the highest reaches of her vary, she gasps, “I need to punch the mirror / To make her see that this gained’t final.” Different instances, the mirror’s idealizing powers might be harnessed for good. On “Man of the Yr,” Lorde visualizes the masculine physique she realizes that she has been eager for. (In an interview, she described making an attempt to turn into “the one who needed to be singing that track on a stage in entrance of individuals,” then placing on denims, a series, and a few strips of tape till “I checked out myself within the mirror and I used to be, like, ‘That’s me, that’s who I’m.’ ”) In each circumstances, a single view refracts: there’s mirror-self, the previous self, the current one; the picture dispelled and the picture made flesh.This multiplicity of views is one thing Lorde has been working towards her complete profession, from the uneasy “we” that dominated “Pure Heroine” and “Melodrama” ’s two mirror-image variations of “Legal responsibility” to “Photo voltaic Energy” ’s “Huge Star,” with its framing of intimate love as a celebrity-paparazzo relationship. The method finds its fullest expression on “Shapeshifter,” the album’s greatest track—and in addition Lorde’s. Over muffled double-time drums, she lurches between the sensory current and the sphere of inconceivable beliefs and harsh judgments, channelling the voices of others admonishing her for promiscuity, worrying that she is uncontrolled—then fending them off with self-deluding phrases: “I’m not affected,” goes the track’s chorus, the place the melody lastly clicks into place, limning the sides of the anthemic banger that it by no means totally turns into. Lorde’s singing voice is usually doubled all through the album, however right here the opposite voices often peel off and sing over and in opposition to her, generally needling, generally supporting.On “Shapeshifter,” all of the fragments of delusion that represent her id flash throughout the refrain in a pulsing, major-key development: “I’ve been the ice, I’ve been the flame / I’ve been the prize, the ball, the chain.” It’s equal components Rimbaud—“I is one other”—and Meredith Brooks—“I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a baby, I’m a mom.” It’s as if Lorde is itemizing these variations of herself to be launched from their weight but additionally to maintain dwelling with them, bringing them below management. Purified and reclaimed, these guises can take their place subsequent to the opposite components of her ever-expanding self-myth. On her web site, she sells a hat with textual content that reads:MYSTICANTIPODEANSPIRITUAL TECHNOLOGISTMEDICINE WOMANMAN OF THE YEAR ♦