Album Review: Lorde - Virgin

A setting stage for her visceral emotions to be stationed within, Lorde finds freedom in it. ‘Virgin’ is both reigniting and fading, presenting her most captivating writing, but also her most ineffective production and compositions to date.

Since the release of ‘Melodrama’, it is clear that Lorde has had enough of the fame and success that have been washed over her since she was a teenager. Opting to become an isolated hermit, even throwing her personal newsletter that later paved way for her overall feelings of said fame to be out on ‘Solar Power’, even despite the borderline meditative touches that tousled that album into its slushy observations and sanded out folk-pop pastiche, only creating the impression that Lorde may prefer to settle into her world, where perhaps what she has to reflect has been all said. Yet, with her clarifying her subtly awkward relationship with Charli XCX on the remix of ‘Girl, So Confusing’, it seems that there is an ecstatic spirit that has been awakened within Lorde. One that requires her to reflect on her most personal aspects of her life.

After pulling into the crowd on Washington State Park for her lead single, a new album is very much on the horizon. ‘Virgin’ is what came out 2 months after that momentous moment, reigniting Lorde’s artistic cravings where she is hunting for a clear answer from questions of her entire life that have now filled the void in her head. Her relationships with her body, her past exes, her mother, and even the fame and the industry are all piercing through her mind. The album is all about her, rendering her freer and emotionally stark than ever.

Within this exploration, she wills more audacious details in her writing, an aspect imparted well on a specific line in the album’s opening cut, ‘Hammer’: “There’s peace in the madness over our heads / Let it carry me up”. It presents just how Lorde is willing to swim herself free out of all the boxes of gender binary, personal expectations, and relationship turmoil she describes across the album so she can cling close to the visceral sides of her. One that yearns for that desirable satisfaction, even if at the end of the album, Lorde is still very much questioning whether or not she is still worthy of love once again. She might have indeed grown past her teenage years and embraced so many freeing parts of herself, but even then, she knows that she is still swerving elsewhere until she has grasped what she really wanted the most.

The return of Lorde’s raw intensity as a performer gets lopsided with Jim E Stack’s production work across the album, an aspect only made worse as Lorde’s melodic patches has reverted from the frenetic energy of ‘Melodrama’ to the bereft vibes of ‘Pure Heroine’, even if Jim E Stack’s blaring textural shudders might give some of these tunes the support they sometimes need. The shuffling programmed drums on ‘Shapeshifter’ are supported with these nimble bass lines and hazy strings; ‘Favourite Daughter’ lets the buzzy synths cascade over the most informed melody of the album; the rumbling guitar strums that build up to that shimmering synthesized vocal runs on ‘Current Affairs’; the blast of guitars and drums bolster Lorde’s punchy vocals and writing to great effect on ‘If She Could See Me Now’. An assemblage of fascinating tunes that are overshadowed with warped textures and filtered blemishes that may support the album’s personal themes, but all the buzzy compression being injected to most of the songs (‘Man Of The Year’ and ‘GRWM’ being the worst examples of this) only dilutes the tension that Lorde provides.

‘Virgin’ essentially creates a blank slate for Lorde to write into, inspecting her passions, her conflicts, and her confusions, which leaves a record that constantly wanders in its own headspace. Sketching out Lorde’s most intriguing writing work to date, yet simultaneously carries her most stagnant production and compositions in quite some time, like a double-edged sword that cuts in its deep and shallow terrain. This new page of Lorde’s artistic mode may not have landed its impact, but it is a second wind that sets her emotions free in a liberating expanse.

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Favorite Tracks: ‘Shapeshifter’, ‘Favorite Daughter’, ‘Current Affairs’, ‘If She Could See Me Now’

Least Favorite Track: ‘GRWM’