“I wrote this from the perspective of, Well I could never say that,” Lorde told BBC1’s Jack Saunders about her new album, Virgin. That which is forbidden sits at the forefront of the New Zealand singer’s latest, which is full of horny, angry, and confused misery. Every Lorde album is both confessional and exorcism: She releases music so infrequently that each new album lands like a meteor of gossip and regrets. Part of what gave Lorde the permission to say the things she says (or sings) aloud in Virgin was her collaboration with Charli XCX last year. “Brat coming out really gave me a kick,” Lorde said, her Kiwi accent making the last word sound way more fun than when non–New Zealanders say it.
That kick is never more apparent than on late-album banger “Broken Glass,” which picks up the narrative introduced in “Girl, so confusing.” When addressing why she and Charli had held each other at a distance in that song, Lorde sang, “I was so lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures, ’cause the last couple years I’ve been at war in my body.” While Lorde’s music had always felt personal, it had never felt quite this personal. It was as if her collaboration with Charli in the context of Brat — an album, in part, about the awfulness and selfishness of fame, image, and love — gave Lorde the space to do the same on her own turf.
That war in her body is outlined with startling clarity and metallic thudding in “Broken Glass.” “Mystique is dead / Last year was bad,” Lorde announces in the song’s opening. Whereas her verse in “Girl, so confusing” was a kind of open-hearted mea culpa — an apology laced with admission — she confidently shoves what made her ill back at us as listeners. We not only bear witness but feel implicated in her aggressive regret at how she “got sucked in by arithmetic.” Like “Homemade Dynamite” and “Tennis Court,” Lorde is at her best when crafting these wrenching bangers — she knows how to turn her darkest moments into undeniable bops.
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Like Brat, “Broken Glass” feels like one of Virgin’s most potent songs, sharply produced and lyrically pointed. It is a feel-bad song of the summer about punishing yourself, and subsequently punishing yourself further for punishing yourself in the first place. “I wanna 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 in the song’s chorus. What feels newest to Lorde in Virgin is that which hit hardest in Brat: a blunt realization that time is passing. As listeners, we’ve grown with Lorde as she went from precocious high-schooler to worldweary late-20-something. Virgin is her first album that reckons — dangerously, seductively, frustratingly — with death. What makes a song like “Broken Glass” stand out beyond its upbeat tempo and tangible anger is that Lorde is telling us she’s aware of the damage. She knows that what she puts her body through is unhealthy and violent and that there are consequences. Just as a mirror cannot be put back together, Lorde is newly aware that all of this — her relationships, her body, her work — is finite. “Just a phase (broken glass), just a phase,” she repeats toward the end of the song. This break from herself is temporary. Last year was bad, sure, but it’s a different year now.
