Praise the Lorde, our favourite alt-pop songstress is back and she is getting more personal than ever on new album Virgin, which debuted on Friday (27 June) to rave reviews ahead of the singer’s surprise Glastonbury set.

“Let it break me down till I’m just a wreck/Till I’m just a voice living in your head,” the Kiwi singer laments on the album’s opening track “Hammer”, giving us a taste of the version of 28-year-old Lorde – real name Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor – we are about to uncover; that she has laid out so vulnerably for us. “It’s a fucked-up world, been to hell and back/But I’ve sent you a postcard from the edge/The edge.”

Lorde’s fourth album Virgin, which dropped on Friday (27 June), is a departure from her previous LP, the polarising 2021 Solar Power which saw the Kiwi singer reject the surface level of glamour of celebrity (“Goodbye to all the bottles, all the models/Bye to the clouds in the skies that all hold no rain-“), throw her phone into the water and lose herself to crystals and transcendental meditations. It was an album about taking in the sun-soaked, simple pleasures of life but was simultaneously laced with a palpable sense of inescapable anxiety (“‘Cause all the beautiful girls, they will fade like the roses), the contradiction of it all played out for us by hazy imagery, soothing tones and the introspective poetic lyricism Lorde is so acutely known for.

Virgin, by contrast, is more biting, more direct, something much closer to the swelling highs and blistering lows of her critically acclaimed 2017 sophomore album Melodrama. “I might have been born again/I’m ready to feel like I don’t have thе answers,” she declares on “Hammer”, similarly – but much more firmly – to how she gently advised us on Solar Power‘s opening number “The Path” that “if you’re looking for a saviour, well, that’s not me”.

Virgin sees Lorde – a relatively private person who tends to disappear from the public eye between album cycles – refuse to shy away from addressing her private anguish head on: her gender journey, her relationship with her mother, her heartbreak, her struggles with an eating disorder. The latter, we were told about for the first time on the remix of Charli XCX “Girl, so confusing” (“‘Cause for the last couple years/I’ve been at war in my body”), which, yes, made the internet go crazy.

It is an album that is a “rebirth”, the artist said, adding it leaves “nowhere to hide” and was about “trying to make a document that reflected my femininity: raw, primal, innocent, elegant, openhearted, spiritual, masc”.

It is a return to form for Lorde, which many critics have praised.

Identity has always been a strong theme in Lorde’s work and ahead of the album’s release, perhaps the most discussed theme was Lorde’s journey with her gender. The album was inspired, in-part, was by feeling her “gender broadening a little bit” and “coming into my masculinity a bit more”, telling Rolling Stone in an interview that she is “in the middle, gender-wise” and informing fellow pop icon Chappell Roan: “I’m a woman, except for the days when I’m a man.”

A preview of this theme is given at the start of the album on “Hammer” when she accepts ambivalence, musing “some days, I’m a woman, some days, I’m a man” with a vocal shrug.

In “Man of the Year”, the second song from Virgin to be released as a single and the fourth on the album’s track list, the artist touches on her evolving gender in a way many people – trans or not – can relate to, shedding internal shame stepping into your most authentic self: “Take my knife and I cut the cord/My babe can’t believe I’ve become someone else/Someone more like myself.” The powerful music video for the song saw Lorde remove her top and binde her chest, an image that also harks back to  binder-like bandeau look at the Met Gala, which was designed by Thom Browne. 

The ninth song on Virgin, “Broken Glass”, outlines Lorde’s battle with an battle with an eating disorder an shows just how far we have moved away from the wellness-esque chatter of Solar Power. The track opens on a thumping beat, declaring honestly that “mystique is dead/Last year was bad” and that she was “sucked in by arithmetic”, which she later clarifies as meaning she “spent my summer getting lost in math/Making weight took all I had”. As dark as it is, the song is not without triumph as Lorde describes wanting to “punch the mirror” to “make her see that this won’t last”. “It might be months of bad luck/But what if it’s just broken glass?” she asks us rhetorically, but we – the listeners – don’t have the answers, much like Lorde herself.

In a 4.5/5 review for Rolling Stone, May Georgi said Virgin was Lorde’s “most introspective record yet”, noting “isn’t trying to capture something from the past, but instead leans into the chaos of reinvention” and is the sound of an artist “learning to be OK with the uncertainty of solitude”.

Alex Rigotti for NME, in a 4/5 review, summarised the album as a “vibrant combination of Lorde’s best qualities, and then some”, writing that in “her newfound candour, the record combines the emotional whirlwind of Melodrama, the chilling minimalism of Pure Heroine and the breezy freedom of Solar Power“.

ELLE‘s Erica Gonzales and Samuel Maude wrote, in an in-depth track-by-track review, that Virgin could be a contender for Album of the Year. They said that after the cultural moment that was the BRAT Summer of 2024, Virgin gives us “enough to carry us through our sweat-soaked parties, road trips, and flings, but there’s more to it than that”, it is not so much the “sound of the summer; Virgin, like most of Lorde’s music, is the sound of growing up”.

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