Lorde’s Solar Power is archetypal pandemic pop, a collision of sky-high ambition and undesirable timing. The New Zealand singer-songwriter’s third album, released in August 2021, reveled in the comfort of distance, toasting to idyllic interior worlds. Stuffed with acoustic guitars, Solar felt sharply perpendicular to the expectations of fans with core memories of shouting and dancing along to “Team” and “Homemade Dynamite,” and to the vibe of the overarching summer of back-outside swashbuckling. Its hushed and chipper but ailing singles drew backlash; some challenged the writer’s agency, insinuating that Jack Antonoff, who co-produced the album, led her astray. But recent revelations say the divided response to the last album cycle read too much into the bubbly early-aughts nostalgia on its aesthetic surface, not recognizing Solar’s pursuit of joy, smallness, and sated inaccessibility as coping strategies. While making and eventually touring the album, Lorde struggled with stage fright and an eating disorder; news of a breakup followed her worldwide arena trek. Hyperfocusing on women, weed, and weather appeared to orient the star on a path to gains in psilocybin therapy but fumbled a Lorde album’s chief assignment. She spelled it out this year, reflecting on the fuss on the Therapuss podcast: “I just am this person who’s meant to make these bangers that fuck us all up.”
Everything about Virgin, Lorde’s fourth album, feels like a reaction to trials preceding and following Solar Power. Virgin is rife with epiphanies earned in tussles with one’s own established persona. But these cerebral dispatches realize their audience often experiences the work communally and tends to enjoy it most when accompanied by flowing synths and insistent drums. Pure Heroine and Melodrama left indelible marks on mainstream music; Lorde is instrumental to the 21st-century whisper-singer epidemic. Heroine’s lean minimalism is one of many sonic precursors to the commercial breakthrough of Taylor Swift’s 1989 and thus kin to its many scion. Virgin is a return to bangers. Gone is the cheeky “Can you reach me? No, you can’t” energy of 2021. You’ll find Lorde roaming New York City and excitedly denouncing Solar’s anti-smartphone policy these days. (Premiering lead single “What Was That” in a spring Washington Square Park pop-up highlights how Virgin was conceived for and inspired by crowds.) Lorde dials back the nature themes and acoustic sounds in service to sturdier pop fare and a more approachable façade. Virgin introduces a more confident artist with a newly “expansive” view of gender while seeking to undermine questions of whether she fell off.
Virgin is a delicate act of unification: It angles to revisit the straightforward highs of the first two albums while applying lessons from the thorny, patient third. And while poking around those intersections, the artist admits she didn’t always feel as sure of herself as she looked, in stark contrast to today. The gynecological X-ray in the artwork also serves the layered purpose of reinforcing themes of rebirth, killing the paragon of purity from “Royals” for anyone who hung onto that and truly personifying the feeling of revealing your innermost secrets and desires to the world. Virgin is a break with old-fashioned ideas about how to present in public and in private relationships. But circling back to pairing hard drums and light synth pads keeps a foot in the past. The singles are windows into these balancing acts. As on Solar, the drums often take time to surface, stacks of sound slowly cruising toward a drop that her early albums wouldn’t make you wait as long for. Except the end destination of the unfurling melodies isn’t a mystery here, where ’21 jams like “The Man With the Axe” were sometimes just splashing toward a tasteful Antonoff guitar solo.
Co-conspirators this time — Bon Iver collaborator Jim-E Stack, with sporadic appearances from pop-whisperers like Dev Hynes and Justin Vernon himself — assist the singer with crafting sleek vehicles to streamline her emotional candor. You feel the distorted rhythmic pulse in the opener, “Hammer,” and the sunny notes at the top of “What Was That” teasing skittering, percussive climaxes. The ideas of Solar Power — laconic pacing, a quest for inner peace fed through late ’90s and early-aughts folk-pop and alternative-dance filters — are not absent, but the execution is spiffier. References to New York City venues and streets grace songs whose synths tilt toward trance music while lyrics speak to clawing toward a hard-won joie de vivre. Embracing residency in a city of 8 million citizens had as much of an impact on the tone and texture of this album as pining for escape did on its resort-coded predecessor.
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But songs like “Man of the Year” say Lorde isn’t just reconnecting with the masses but looking to get back to the task of breaking hearts without being subordinate to a fixed identity. The chest-binding gender euphoria of “Man” — “My babe can’t believe I’ve become someone else / Someone more like myself” — is followed by “Favorite Daughter,” where perfectionism is a burden that’s inducing panic attacks. The effusive, uncategorizable self is honored in “Shapeshifter,” and “If She Could See Me Now” taunts an ex by announcing Lorde can lift their body weight in the gym before crediting the breakup with destroying a fantasy she needed to be free from. She stretches out in a multitudinousness, by turns embodying and eschewing the innocence of the teenage 2010s songwriting prodigy romantically linked with older industry men. She felt taken for granted then, “pure heroine mistaken for featherweight,” closer “David” muses; at the end of an album tracking the minting of a bolder, wilder 20-something in a crucible of tears and self-doubt, Lorde sings giddily that she belongs to no one.
Treasured indecisiveness and songs about dogged self-improvement through failure run counter to the posturing of the conquering, confident ’20s pop star, a class that writes songs about knowing what they want and wishing others could deliver. Virgin occupies a headspace removed from the certainty of those desires but makes sure not to stray so far from the synth-pop pack. This trip through a meteoric rise to fame and the rocky romances along the way takes a shape reminiscent of Taylor Swift’s peeking at consequential nights of her past on Midnights. Like an old DVD-commentary track, both albums add to the stories we thought we knew, reflecting on windfalls of notoriety and heartache from a more well-adjusted vantage point and easing a pop star into the old signatures following a folk-and-cabin-fever detour. The question of whether the updated sound supersedes preexisting works it seems to reference is, case by case, yes and no.
There was some light trepidation that “What Was That” and “Man of the Year” portended an album of digging through the closet for old threads. It speaks to a prickly junction in the relationship between artist and audience. People were a bit allergic to the new direction last time, but a sonic U-turn is a concession, a place where pragmatism does outweigh whim. Virgin is most forward-thinking in its philosophical perspective; the music is a bristling, enthusiastic tour of the expected. Nevertheless, the booming Melodrama-core of “GRWM” and “If She Could See Me Now” hits like a homecoming. In the album opener, Lorde admits to not having all the answers to questions plaguing her, but we’re just as unsure of what we want. We chafe when she strays too far from the hit formula and when she adheres too closely to it. The savvy celebrity on the business end of the jockeying just spoon-feeds you their evolution. Lorde works admirably to draft sentences that lacerate — “Every night the room fills up with / People who are convinced I’m not / Just some kid faking it for your love,” “Favorite Daughter” bellows — on an album arguing forcefully for the right to be sprawling and imperfect.
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