the Virgin mother

On Lorde's fourth album, Virgin

It’s hard to even imagine how someone could turn out to be a normal, well-adjusted adult after suddenly becoming one of the most famous musicians in the world as a 16-year-old at the very beginning of your career. And in Virgin (and especially on the album’s promotional tour), Lorde confirms the near impossibility of this. Lorde’s fourth album shows her grappling with being a 29-year-old teenage pop star: even all these years after Royals shot to the top of the charts, she hasn’t quite come to terms with commercially peaking at the first light of her career, hasn’t quite figured out who she is in the midst of fame or adulthood.

I know that’s a brutal, harsh start to this piece! Especially considering that I actually do love the album and have been a card carrying Lorde stan for over a decade. Admittedly, it took me a few days for this album to click for me. The first draft of this piece was mostly critical, which genuinely pained me to write. What didn’t click for me at first was the fact that much of this album felt like a regression. Some of the lyrics do feel immature - very “20something teenage girl” (derogatory). While the leap from Melodrama to Solar Power felt like a maturation, this felt to me, at first, stagnant. There were songs I really enjoyed right off the bat (Current Affairs and Clear Blue, mostly) and moments of other songs that immediately wowed me, but overall I struggled to connect to it.

I will say, the production is undeniably excellent and that was clear to me upon first listen - I was a Jack Antonoff defender, and unfortunately I have to lay my guns down after hearing this. There are some really striking moments of just excellent music - the beginning of Favourite Daughter, the harmonies in Clear Blue, the delicious interpolation of Suga Suga in If She Could See Me Now. Lorde joined forces with Jim-E Stack to produce this album, and I think that sonically the production supports the breathy, almost alien quality of Lorde’s voice perfectly. The production mixes in the edge of Pure Heroine, the crossover of hedonism and yearning of Melodrama, the breezy transcendence of Solar Power and as a result, creates something that is undeniably and completely Lorde.

The album did eventually click for me - I was listening to Favorite Daughter while doing my makeup and suddenly felt like I had been shot in the chest. Lorde ruminates on her role as daughter often in this album but most explicitly in this song, where she opens up about her perfectionism driven by the fiery desire to not only live up to her mother’s expectations but to be worthy of her mother’s sacrifices. Jesuuuuus Christ. Unfortunately I fear that the venn diagram of Lorde fans and people who felt victimized by the lyrics to this song are a circle. And when that song clicked for me, the whole album clicked into place.

What I first took to be a regression is, in a way. But more so it’s a return, a stripping down to the bones of selfhood, which she quite literally does in the cover art. Lorde is indeed processing her teenage popstar-dom, but with a new level of clarity now that she’s so far from it and it is clear that she’ll likely never hit that same level of widespread fame again. And so she is able to return to the foundation of herself and address the reality of her life frankly, a process that can naturally feel like a step-forward-then-step-back situation.

With the naming of her perfectionism (both in Favorite Daughter and in Broken Glass, which is about her struggle with an eating disorder) she begins the journey to releasing it. In GRWM she considers her teenage self’s opinion on the grown version of herself but ultimately accepts that womanhood is a journey and a long term state of being rather than a finish line you cross. On the other hand, she considers her masculinity in Man of the Year, which is a truly transparent consideration of self, a real X-ray of the Lorde she is and is becoming (she has said that despite the broadening of her gender identity, she still uses she/her pronouns). On Jake Shane’s podcast, Lorde says that the album's title is a description of purity (virgin wool, virgin hair, etc), and it does feel like we’re getting in touch with the purest, least filtered version of her here - the Lorde that exists in her head.

But the album doesn’t spend all its time in her head, occupied with her own bones and neuroses - occasionally it moves outside to consider her relationships and who she is within them. As I mentioned earlier, she talks a lot about her mother-daughter relationship, but also considers her romantic relationships. Shapeshifter details all the different versions of herself she has transformed into in order to suit the desires of her sexual partners, while Current Affairs and What Was That reminisce on relationships gone wrong. In the latter two, the relationships are fiery moments of passion and fun, the type that make you feel alive until they don’t. Sonically these songs reflect that inherent conflict - they’re very dance-y and upbeat until you listen to the lyrics.

And then finally, the album ends with David, which merges the internal and external relationships - she declares “I don’t belong to anyone”, a refrain that is both one of freedom and isolation. This song is one of the most overtly emotional on the album, a fitting end to an album about transparency. She ruminates on a relationship with an unbalanced power dynamic where she gives everything - “if I had virginity I would give that too” - but ultimately realizes that nothing she can give will be enough. It’s the more depressing consequence of the behavior she details in Shapeshifter. In the end, she determines, she only has herself, her bones, her roots, her history. When she strips it all down, Lorde only has her. It’s a realization she comes to in almost every song on the album in one way or another, so it’s only right to end it with the repetition of that daunting, freeing phrase: I don’t belong to anyone”.

So yes, in the end I came to love and appreciate and understand this album. Perhaps my initial reluctance to it was my own projection: Lorde is the artist whose music most clearly marks my experience of growing up, and I was unwilling to see my own regression reflected back at me. While Solar Power was the early 20s confidence that you’re getting the hang of things, Virgin is the late 20s realization that that isn’t true. I felt much older and more sure of my life at 24 than I do at 27, and it seems that Lorde feels the same. But I don’t want to face that! A transparent look at your own regression is a hard pill to swallow but Lorde does it, and so must the rest of us. In being a step back, Virgin is also a step forward.