Lorde – Virgin (Universal) (13th Floor Album Review)

Lorde’s fourth album, Virgin, marks a daring and deeply personal evolution that both builds on and breaks away from her earlier work. On her last album, Solar Power, Lorde drifted into moments of detachment and sun-bleached aloofness. Virgin returns to the visceral.

There is blood, breath, ovulation, and longing. It reclaims the confessional power of Melodrama and the sparse clarity of Pure Heroine, creating something fragmented, unstable, and urgent.

This time, Lorde has parted ways with long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff, and partnered instead with Jim-E Stack (James Harmon Stack), whose production brings an altogether different energy. As with his work for Caroline Polachek and Bon Iver, Stack brings textured unease and emotional ambiguity to the record. His glitchy, rhythmically off-centre sonic palette amplifies the lyrical themes of gender fluidity, disorientation, and emotional unravelling, while deepening the intimacy of the vocals. The silences and ruptures act as emotional punctuation.

Virgin is a lyrical and musical landscape in which patterns echo, mutate, and dissolve. Vocally, Lorde whispers, chants, intones, and questions, her delivery often teetering on the edge of speech. She draws us into private space: the repeated keyboard pulse and whispered lines of Hammer feel like a breathless confession. The sonic structure reflects this tension, there are sudden stops, ominous rumbles, and a final withholding that leaves the listener suspended.

What Was That stages an emotional ambush: “Wake up from a dream. Well baby, what was that?” before drums and synths bloom underneath. The repetition, “I try, I try” becomes both plea and mantra, a sonic heartbeat. Stack’s production resists resolution, its subtle shifts in dynamics keep us off balance, leaving us with a feeling of unresolved intimacy.

On Shapeshifter, bubbling synths give way to whispered declarations and rushing layers, mirroring a psychological inventory. Lorde lists, reclaims, and redefines herself, and when she finally sings “Tonight I just want to fall”, it feels like a letting go of expectation and explanation, as much as a physical release.

Man of the Year and Favourite Daughter tighten the focus on gender, legacy, and family. The former moves from spare vocals and cello to full-blown celebration. There is a gender fluid moment of triumph with “Let’s hear it for the man of the year.” In Favourite Daughter, piano and drums push personal history into danceable form: “Be as brave as my mother.”

Across the tracks the body, intimacy, and self presentation become the focus of conflict, ritual, and revelation. Current Affairs opens with guitar pulses and the pointed statements “Spit in my mouth” lands with visceral force because of the sonic restraint. Clearblue draws us into a moment of private reckoning, its title nods to pregnancy, while echoing vocals and discordant synths wrap the track in a hush of sacred uncertainty. On GRWM, icy synths layer under whispered lines as Lorde quietly examines the way we inherit and construct identity, and how daily acts of preparation are a form of emotional armour.

For the album’s final movement, Lorde leans toward affirmation and questioning. Broken Glass pulses with danceable rhythms but holds its emotional cards close. “I” recurs constantly, asserting selfhood even in self-doubt. If She Could See Me Now breathes between synth bursts, offering one of the album’s most hopeful moments: “I can feel, don’t need no fantasy.” And finally, David is a sparse, aching song whose lyrics suggest Lorde is in direct conversation with her younger self: “Pure Heroine mistaken for featherweight.” Here, Stack’s production becomes nearly spectral. The silences around lines like “Am I ever gonna love again?” say as much as the words themselves.

Virgin circles, breathes, stutters, and flares. It draws the listener into an intense and uncertain form of introspection. Lyrically, it is preoccupied with the body, what resonates through our genes, and what it means to be a self in flux. For those who have followed Lorde’s arc from detached teen oracle to sensual, unstable narrator, Virgin is the sound of an artist shedding skin, unafraid of the mess beneath. Throughout, Lorde’s vocals, whether near-spoken, breathy, or shifting in pitch, invite us to share in her internal world and embodied experience.

And crucially, this is not a retreat from pop, but a challenge to its expectations and a reimagining of pop femininity. With Jim-E Stack as co-conspirator, Lorde has delivered a sonically daring and emotionally ambiguous album. Virgin is a vital listen from a major artist, but it is a disarming experience. You don’t get neat hooks or tidy conclusions. What you get is transformation.

John Bradbury

Virgin is out now on Universal NZ

John Bradbury
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