Nearly four years later, the hype that surrounded Lorde’s third album, Solar Power, feels like a relic. The buzz of her sophomore masterpiece Melodrama had already ballooned the importance of her prodigious introduction on Pure Heroine, and whatever was meant to come next would have to meet an impossibly high mark. From “Green Light” to “Perfect Places,” and with “Liability” stuck in-between, Melodrama was and is, by all accounts, one of the greatest second acts of this century—an effort so terrific it landed on Paste’s list of the greatest albums of all time in 2024. Melodrama was written and performed by a phenomenon whose debut single moved 10 million copies worldwide before she turned 18. Few musicians of Lorde’s generation have faced such intense prospects heading into their third album.
But I adored the swing of Solar Power, even if its songs didn’t quite connect like “Team” or “Supercut” had in the previous decade. The music sounded like a musician trying to combat the poisons of expectation. It felt experimental, not just because Lorde doused her goth-pop tones in psychedelic sunshine, but because she wrote about climate anxiety and getting stoned, and pawed at thin-but-fun recreations of a pop gravitas already mastered by the likes of Eurythmics and Robyn. Everyone expected her to write more wise-beyond-her-years music, but she rejected that, disavowing her own teenage stardom. “Mood Ring” is still one of her best singles, even if many critics disagreed then and now. Some writers and listeners lauded her new era, though, praising her tributes to Mother Earth and the beachy rewrites of her macabre style. In 2021, I likened Melodrama and Solar Power to Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Court and Spark. I feel even better about that parallel now, knowing that her new album Virgin could be The Hissing of Summer Lawns once it reaches the right people. Or, perhaps: Virgin‘s blue hues and elemental subversions better resemble Madonna’s choice to release Erotica after Like a Prayer 32 years ago.
Like her peers Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo in the immediate post-quarantine years, Lorde made her “anti-fame” album in Solar Power—turning the focus away from herself and towards the decaying world nearby. But while some of the laid-back existentialism found on Solar Power has resurfaced again four years later, it’s Lorde’s contributions to Charli XCX’s “Girl so confusing version with lorde”—in which the two pop musicians squash their supposed beef and sing openly about body dysmorphia, projection, and the troubles of icon behavior—that contour her decisions on Virgin. Musically, it’s the least-ambitious album Lorde has ever made, thanks to her avoidance of the big hooks and explosive resolutions that pop orthodoxy demands. But, in an undeniably personal collection of songs full of clichés and gestures toward conversations around earthly desires, gender, and habitual living, it’s Ella Yelich O’Connor’s most important statement yet. After ditching longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, Lorde sourced contributions from co-producers Jim-E Stack (Gracie Abrams, Dominic Fike) and Daniel Nigro (Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo), Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Andrew Aged, Dev Hynes (Blood Orange), Buddy Ross, and Fabiana Palladino, substituting slam-dunk bangers with reinvention and restraint surrendered through hushed and reflective vestiges.
Virgin is a complicated record. Its songs confuse me. They anger me. They inspire me. I want to untangle their motifs yet never want to hear some of them ever again. “What Was That” should be the best pop song of 2025 but “I remember saying then, ‘This is the best cigarette of my life’” is one of the worst lines Lorde has ever committed herself to. Then, on the acapella, Imogen Heap-reverence of “Clearblue,” she lets go of the best line she’s ever written: “I rode you until I cried.” Much of Jim-E Stacks’ production on Virgin dissolves into itself, though “Clearblue” is a great exception—with Lorde rhapsodizing about pregnancy tests, a “broken blood” passed down generationally, and the memory of “being this alive” through a vocoder with a harmonic accompaniment from Dev Hynes drifting beneath her. The Dexta Daps-sampling “Current Affairs” and “Secrets From a Girl”-reminiscent “GRWM” (an acronym for “get ready with me”) hint at bombast but never fully embrace it, instead allowing Lorde’s references to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s leaked sex tape and current TikTok trends sound cleverly trapped in a limbo between cultures. Album opener “Hammer” finds its destination by relying heavily on Jim-E Stack’s arrangement of teardrop keys, clipped vocals, and choppy percussion, and a delightful crest of drums in the finale of ballad “Man of the Year” flanks the restless, flashy synth tangents of “Favourite Daughter,” Virgin’s song of the summer-ready centerpiece.
“Broken Glass” and “Shapeshifter” are especially intimate, as Lorde grapples with her history of eating disorders on the former (“I spent my summer getting lost in math, making weight took all I had”) and reckons with not just compulsion through the dissatisfaction of a one-night stand on the latter (“If I’m fine without it, why can’t I stop?”), but her pattern of embodying the people she sleeps with. “You met me at a really strange time in my life” is Lorde’s great concession on “Man of the Year,” because you could apply it to where we reunite with her on Virgin broadly. She makes odd choices in her search for gratification, like the cheeky, awkward interpolation of Baby Bash’s “Suga Suga” in “If She Could See Me Now,” but returns to what’s familiar, like the exhausted platitudes of “What Was That” that give way to a vocal performance siphoning the gusto out of “Supercut.” You can hear fragments of a generational pop star within an imperfect effort like this, especially in the bouncy pop vibrato of “Favourite Daughter,” the party montage drums of “Shapeshifter,” and Lorde’s lingering, cloudy alto cutting into focus on “Broken Glass.”
And, in the chorus of the terrific, self-referential (“Pure heroine, mistaken for featherweight”), Justin Vernon-assisted closer “David,” she sings, “I don’t belong to anyone” before repeating “Am I ever gonna love again?” in an outro of choppy, strident synths. Perhaps the most important part of Virgin is that Lorde’s transparency never becomes translucent. She happily parades just how much she’s got left to figure out. When she confronts her own gender on “Hammer,” singing “Some days, I’m a woman, some days, I’m a man,” she then sits with ego death in “Man of the Year” and questions her own capacity for love in the wake of being “broken open.” What Virgin presents to its listeners are uncomfortable paths. The body is not a label but a vessel of shame, hard damage, and, miraculously and eventually, freedom. Family trauma and unprotected sex exist in the same sentence; “You spit in my mouth like you’re saying a prayer” is a holy, fearless admission; identity is as temperamental now as it was on “Still Sane”; New York City is a nebula and a north star; the cigarettes, drugs, and clubs presented as an escape on Melodrama have turned into needful anchors eight years later. This is Lorde naked but nearly full. So let’s forget that teenage shit: Virgin aches with flaw while welcoming us into its breaking, carnal mess. We might as well step inside anew. It’s time to grow up and know even less.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
