Virgin (2025)
Lorde's newest album lets go of perfection
If you’ve ever watched Lorde perform or give an interview, you’ll know she’s kind of an off kilter person (said with love and admiration). It’s a side of her that has been noticeably absent in her music. Pure Heroine (2013) is as smooth and polished as a ping pong ball, and Melodrama (2017) lets a little bit of grit in but only in that way that one artfully crafts a blurry Instagram slideshow to convey a night of debauchery. Her newest album Virgin (2025) on the other hand has the awkwardness of dragging rebar across concrete.
This change in sound allows for a sometimes grating, less aesthetically pleasing atmosphere, mimicking the emotional thrust of the album: giving up perfection in favor of coming to terms with yourself, warts and all. In “GRWM” she lays this out most plainly: her vision of the grown woman she wants to be: “wide hips, tooth chipped…skin scarred, looking forward...my mama’s trauma” and later “2009 me’d be so impressed.” Like many of the songs on the album, it starts with a low thrum of a repeated note, like an anxious heartbeat, which later explodes out into often discordant choruses of musical sounds. This theme is so present throughout Virgin, to the point where as a listener you’re tempted to say “we get it already!”
But in some ways that’s also the genius of the album. It sounds metallic and feels repetitive because that’s what this sort of journey looks like: a slow, circular process akin to hammering steel sheets into armor. If you’ve ever had to work on yourself in any way you’re familiar with this feeling of confronting an inner demon popping its head up again with the exasperated energy of responding STOP to a text from a politician asking for money.
Despite its strengths, it’s impossible to not compare Virgin to Melodrama. To put it plainly, even if it’s intentional, Virgin feels more static and just less interesting to listen to than her past smash hit album. Melodrama was lightning in a bottle (or homemade dynamite, if you want to be cute with it), and her follow up Solar Power (2021) was a bit of a critical disappointment.
So Virgin is stuck: stray too far from Melodrama and it’s not giving the people what they want, but drinking from the same well again is like going to your high school reunion to relive past glory. Virgin takes the smartest possible way out of this double bind by pulling out the more jarring production elements from Melodrama (like the mechanical screeching in the transition point of “Hard Feelings/Loveless”) to underpin an album about grappling with this exact tension. The last song, “David,” includes the line “I don’t belong to anyone” in the chorus, paired with an outro where she repeats “am I ever going to love again?” – there’s a compelling anxious vulnerability in admitting just how scary it is to no longer live in service to other people.
The funny thing about giving up your people pleasing tendencies is that you tend to please people less. Maybe Lorde will never make something as good as Melodrama again – maybe it came out at a point in her life where self destruction and perfectionism brewed the perfect storm for its creation. But Virgin indicates that it’s still interesting to listen to Lorde as she moves on from that moment in her life.
Each month I will try to highlight an organization that’s important to me, in a small attempt to help out In These Trying Times. While financial donations are great, there’s also other ways to get involved in community building work — volunteering, building relationships with neighbors, offering up skills and services you might have.
Today I’m shouting out the Immigrant Defense Project.