Lorde Gets Physical on “Virgin”
The space was packed—teenagers in grey, thirty-somethings rocking Melodrama merch, and one woman in her early 20s who didn’t even know Lorde was releasing new music. She’s not on social media and “didn’t know people still listened to her,” laughing and propping her journal atop a shelf of Rock records (J through M). She spent the duration of the listening event writing poetry and giggling to herself at the album’s more provocative lyrics. “Now that’s a Lorde fan,” I thought.
But if she captured Lorde’s wit, it was the group of four rowdy teens dancing, stomping, and thrashing through every track that really embodied Virgin. It’s an awkward, restless, and incredibly physical album with an unrelenting focus on bodies, fluids, weight, menstruation, and sexuality. It’s scaffolded by industrial sounds that scrape through the mix: the metallic scratches on the post-chorus of “What Was That,” the clipped screeches that line the drums on “Favourite Daughter,” the blown-out vocal tremolo at the end of “David.” It’s intentionally rough in places, showing its seams.
Lyrically, Lorde zooms in. She abandons the sweeping generational statements made on “Perfect Places,” “Fallen Fruit,” and “A World Alone.” Virgin is a story of one person trying to figure their shit out, day by day (or more like night by night). The opening track “Hammer” declares, “I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” and the rest of the album follows suit.
The record fully commits to physicality. In “GRWM,” Lorde documents her chipped teeth, wide hips, and inherited trauma with the playfulness of #justgirlythings. “Broken Glass” details the lengths she went to maintain a certain weight—losing a whole summer (and figuratively, much of her youth) to calorie calculations. “Shapeshifter” highlights how people-pleasing can manifest as sexual versatility (justice for the vers community)! “Favourite Daughter” unpacks Lorde pushing her body and psyche to the limit for her mother’s approval. “If She Could See Me Now” is a return to the gym, to the studio, to the city, not for the sake of productivity or aesthetics, but rebirth. “Man of the Year” explores the anxiety of renewal and alignment with one’s own body: she’s desperate to feel at home in her own skin, but fear creeps in, asking, “Who’s gonna love me like this?” That’s one of the most annoying parts of gender exploration, isn’t it? As a human existing in the world, your body’s never just your own. We’re always imagining how others will perceive it, react to it, desire it.
Virgin is sexual, but not really sexy. We get vignettes of spitting in mouths on “Current Affairs,” jerking off on “Man of the Year,” uncontrollable urges on “Shapeshifter.” Even the city fountains kiss her neck. On this album, though, sex is consequential and anxiety-inducing. The tape of Pamela Anderson’s honeymoon, which Lorde confesses to watching on “Current Affairs,” represents the thin lines between vulnerability, intimacy, and violation. Something so “pure and true” can become dark and traumatic when shared with the world. Ella’s ode toa pregnancy test on “Clearblue” offers a moment of surreal stillness, where the sex she’s used to forge connection and distract from underlying issues may bring about new life, an accidental continuation of the “broken blood” passed down through her. Even the album’s title, Virgin, meaning unmarried woman, suggests an independence that is fleeting or ephemeral. Virginity implies purity (for now), freedom (for now), self-possession (for now).
The album encapsulates a moment in time, a transparent snapshot of everything going on inside her. The cover art reflects lessons learned, the jeans and belt donned through her reunion with masculinity in “Man of the Year,” the IUD placed after the pregnancy scare in “Clearblue,” the body she’s learned to let be through the horrors of “Broken Glass” and triumphs of “If She Could See Me Now.” There is a stark neutrality to it.
In its frankness and ambivalence, Virgin is admittedly hard to write about. I see this record following in the lineage of Brat or Motomami, an androgynous self-exploration reveling in its own jagged edges — which might actually be one of the defining musical trends of the 2020s. It’s a meticulous, artful experiment brimming with texture: the vocoder catching her untrimmed breaths on “Clearblue”; the tinny, demo-sounding drums that open up “Broken Glass”; the oddly-placed Dexta Daps sample in “Current Affairs” (which, to be clear, I love). Lorde has created something at once physical, synthetic, poetic, and messy on Virgin, painting a flawed character portrait that will probably gain appreciation with time, much like SZA’s Ctrl or Charli’s How I’m Feeling Now. Postmodern in its perspective, Virgin abandons Melodrama’s “meaning in the madness” and Solar Power’s pontifications on larger society, demonstrating a more vulnerable humility on Lorde’s part.
What the album lacks in clarity it makes up for in exploration and commitment to the physical. Breaking her back, rotting her teeth, riding her bike, riding her partner, washing herself, taping her chest, piercing her ears, Virgin thrives in its physicality, asking the listener to consider what it is to be a woman, be a person, have a body. And the point of that experiment is not to find an answer, but to ask the questions!