Even though she’s dropped an album every four years, Lorde’s career has felt so start-stop that it’s surprising to realize we’ve had a dozen trips around the sun since “Royals” lofted her, at the age of just 16, to Grammy-winning, global stardom in a matter of months. She drops an album, tours, and then basically hides in plain sight until she’s ready to do it again. That’s not a criticism — props to her for handling fame so fully on her own terms, despite the anxieties she’s spoken of in her musical collaboration/ therapy session with Charli xcx on “Girl, So Confusing,” and the robust publicity and social-media campaign leading up to this latest, much louder chapter in her career.
While her voice and melodies are always unmistakably her, each of those chapters has been dramatically different from the one before, and this one is no exception. Her last album, the ethereal “Solar Power,” was so hushed and quietly recorded that you had to strain to hear much of it, even the songs that feature the heavenly-voiced trio of Lorde, Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo (a sort of alternative-universe Boygenius).
This one is about being bigger, bolder, noisier, and much more comfortable in her own skin. Gone are the acoustic guitars and smallness of “Solar Power,” which was written in pandemic seclusion in the countryside of her native New Zealand. This is a New York and London album: It’s loud, with fast beats, weird noises, lush keyboard textures and a busy-ness that her music hasn’t had in a long time.
And lyrically, it’s as revealing as the x-ray of her pelvis on the album’s cover. There are heavy emotions in every song, which she’s said stem in part from a breakup, an eating disorder and general anxiety and self-loathing; there are references to punching mirrors, stage fright, ego death, obsessing over body weight, even bodily functions. The themes might verge into oversharing for some, but it’s always been a part of her persona, and the upshot is about confronting, accepting and/or resolving one’s own messiness and starting over (hence the title).
No mistake it starts with a song called “Hammer”: “There’s a heat in the pavement, my mercury’s racin’/ Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation/ When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The last line before the chorus is “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man” — and that’s all in the album’s first minute.
Musically, she’s swapped Jack Antonoff, her primary collaborator on the previous two albums, for Bon Iver/ Kacy Hill veteran Jim E. Stack, whose electronics-dominated music here matches the lyrics perfectly, rising and receding with the emotions, pulling back or piling on for impact. On “Shapeshifter,” possibly the most powerful song on the album, the lyrics make their point — “I’ve been up on a pedestal/ But tonight I just wanna fall” — but for the final minute her overdubbed vocals repeat those words as the music builds in speed and velocity, climaxing with a glorious wash of racing beats, celestial electronics and a string arrangement from Rob Moose.
Conversely, the brief “Clearblue” is just her vocals, one of them autotuned to automaton-ness; “Broken Glass” features a backing vocal that sounds so much like Robyn we were poring over the credits for her name (Lorde is the only credited vocalist). There are occasional sonic similarities with Bon Iver’s latest, “Sable, Fable” — which isn’t surprising, since Stack worked on both albums in the same period — but they never sound alike.
Obviously, “Virgin” is very autobiographical and a bit of an elaborate self-cleanse, but it’s also the sound of a person in the second half of their twenties finding wisdom and themselves. And judging by how often in the past few years she’s been cited as a major influence by young female artists, it will be interesting to see how far this album reaches.
