LORDE is the greatest ambiguity in contemporary pop, and also the greatest mystical. This contradiction has pushed its music from the beginning. “We were not busy in your love relationship,” announced in 2013, “Royals”, taking a challenging position against the world of culture, only to spend the rest of her album in Début, making its amazing version of this same world, an endless occurrence of the mind, through the teenage concerts “Livin” in their arms in a palace. “In the album” Solar Power “, which was released in 2021, she put her attention on the culture of wellness in the new era with the same mixture of confidence and sympathy, one moment that makes fun of one of her acquaintances to exchange difficult drugs for yoga, and the next singing about her powers in appearance:” I can make anything real. “Although her voice and her sensation have put the tune of alternative pop music in the contract and a half The past-by operating the entire category-it is before all this ability to slip between magic and disappointment, and to break myths and replace them with new panels, and this distinguishes the Lord.
On “Virgin”, her fourth and newest album, Lorde examines the myths whose identity is. This residue comes after a series of adversity: the end of the relationship between the longest singer, eating disorder, and a period of artistic re -calibration after the launch of the “solar power”, the first album that did not turn the pop music in a seismic way. Lord touched on some of these materials in “a girl, very confusing that includes Lord”, the Charlie -Conimation anthem she sang in 2024, shakes a feverish list of insecurity on a harsh rhythm. “Virgin” begins somewhere Stilller, after the metal noise subsides.
“Maybe I was born again / I am ready to feel that I do not have the answers,” sings on the opening track, “Hammer”, before the song erupted in a distorted crushing, beating like a heat wave burning. “Now we wake up from the dream,” and she shines on “what was that,” a disintegrated song when you expect it to swell, and culminates in asking the title, but it has never been answered. These can be statements about victory, but in the hands of Lord, they feel more mysterious: the force that makes a new birth is unconfirmed. The issue of the dream content remains, fog rocks are a distant function that barely wanders.
In thin disgology like Lord, it is easy to find patterns. You can say that “Heroine Pure” (2013) and “Solar Energy” are life records: the first about the amazing visions of the time you presented early in the early twenty -ups, and the latter about the singer’s contradiction towards what he called at the time when the “Habi House” was in California. “Melodrama”, recorded for 2017, is more than a relations album, and “Virgin” follows its example, in some way. The songs that were observed spin sharply through Lost Love, found lust, family shock, sex exploring.
With “Virgin”, Lorde is a firm return to New York – the city that she recorded years before “Milodrama” in the apartment of Lina Dunham and Jack Antonov, her boyfriend in Dunham and the album producer. In the period before “Virgin”, Lorde holds a promotional concert in Washington Square Park, delivered a direct hearing at The Tiny Venue Baby’s All Right, and he appeared in the Knicks Playoff game in the royal blue; In the album, she named Canal Street Street and tells the eclipse in “The Park”. I talked about the overlapping years, and “solar energy”, as a decline: “I have somewhat disappeared and everything is on the beach, I was just,” in fact, I don’t think this is me. “I am only this person who was supposed to make these delinquents who have sex with us all.” When the first individual song of the album was dropped, “What that that”, her fans were impatiently for the model, and the images of the path-the memory of the nights fed by MDMA with a lover, smoke the best cigarette in her life-to scenes of songs such as “green light”, where she urges a conservative lover to remember “How do we accept when we do the extension of the land.”
“What was,” though, not exactly a guard. Like most songs in the album, they are more than anti -suffocating anti -suffocating, and it permanently obscures the moment of turbulent vents. Where “Melodrama” linked the writing to recognition with the luxurious and exorbitant Antonov produced-the combinations and guitars on each song until meditation acquired the power of the 4-D- “Virgin” movie is an extensive objective. Jim-E Stack, the main collaborator of Lord in the record (and rumors of her new boyfriend), has formed a new low key for the gradual pop over the past few years, as it focused on versions by Bon Iver, Caroline Polachek, Gracie Abrams and others. Here it comes out of the Washy Reverb and Neon Keyboard in the Antonoff era and confirms the dry, solid drums and backup clothes that leave a large space for singing. It is the minimum chips on the AG Cook vote in the red on “Brat” in Charli, although the producers share a convergence of associated arrangements and abrasive water materials; Sometimes, “Virgin” like “Brat” that heard from the adjacent room looks, or was called on the morning of Greej. It is a suitable voice for a album about, among other things, the desire to return to zero, and overcome excess hygiene and emerging theory.
Like all Lorde music, “Virgin” also revolves around the relationship between the world of taste, sensory touch, the world of images, characters and interfaces. Although the “GRWM” track is a reference to the famous Tiktok type “Get League with me” in which the creators share their beauty procedures, the song itself tracks the most intimate transition process from self to another, a body tending to perfect versions of itself, such as a lot from the outside. It contains some of its smallest writings about sex and the worldly beyond: “Soap, wash it from my chest”, sings, every verbal syllable with a cursed stab. The choir re -shortening the title as a different kind of ambitious image, a ruling that was handed over to himself in the mirror: “The girl has grown” – but also, later, “I was looking for a woman who slept”, and then, in Outro, “I cannot find a woman who has grown.” There is no bitterness or mockery in this progress, just an endless endeavor. When a teenage Lord has seized this scene as an opportunity to have a shallow culture obsessed with pictures, here simply take a stock of itself-giving up the teeth, the “pink galaxy” for acne-looking forward. She was older after that. It’s smaller than that now.
She looks forward, and gets up again, and captures a glimpse of herself on a lover series: “Virgin” is the mirror hall, everyone offers a partial and perhaps distorted view. Sometimes, the mirror appears the body in its most exciting, pursuit and suffering. “A mirror, a mirror, on his shirt / I see a hot chaos in an ancient skirt,” draws a lord with her distinctive logical voice on “Shapeshifter”. “Broken Glass”, the most perceived song in the registry, goes further, the previous self -treatment of the singer in the labor disorders. At the highest levels of its scope, she is committed, “I want to present the mirror / to make it see this will not last.” At other times, the perfect mirror forces can be harnessed forever. In “Man of the Year”, Lorde depicts the male body that you realize that she was yearning for her. (In an interview, I described an attempt to become “the person who wanted to sing that song on the stage in front of the people”, then put the jeans, a chain, and some slices of the tape until I looked at myself in the mirror and I was, like, this is what I am, “the image dispels and made the image of the body.
This pluralism from the views is something that works for a rose for her entire career, from the uncomfortable “we” who took control of the “pure heroine” and “melodrama” of two identical versions of the relationship of “responsibility” to “solar power”. This technology finds its full expression on “Shapeshifter”, which is the best album’s song – and also Lorde’s. During the dual-time drums, it was abandoned between the sensual present, the field of impossible ideals and the harsh rulings, and directed the voices of others that you attend for mixing, and worrying to be out of control-and then they ultimately deviate from them, as it is late for those that are late. Lorde’s lyric sound often doubles all over the album, but here other sounds are exfoliated sometimes, sings and against them, and sometimes supported them.
On “Shapeshifter”, all the fragments of the legend whose identity is flash across the choir in a vibrant progress, a main key: “I was ice, I was flame / I was the prize, the ball, the chain.” They are equal parts – “I am another” – and Merridith Brooks – “I am a prostitute, I am a lover, I am a child, I am a mother.” It seems as if Lord lists these versions of themselves to be released from their weight, but also to continue to live with them, which makes them under control. They can be purified and restored, and these shapes can take their place next to other parts of their self -expanded subjective materials. On its website, it sells a hat with a text that reads:
