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Lorde’s fourth album follows her mis-step with 2021’s Solar Power, a breezily psychedelic affair that aimed to lighten her reputation for intensity and angst. It met with a less-than-sunny reception, which the New Zealander has described as “confounding”. So changes are afoot for Virgin.
Regular collaborator Jack Antonoff is replaced by US indie musician Jim E-Stack, who produced the singer’s verse on last year’s remix of Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing”: a sensational match-up that brought about the reboot that Solar Power failed to provide. Her new songs are studded with references to fresh starts and new selves. These are linked to the experience of gender fluidity that the New Zealander broaches in an unusually plain-speaking way on “Hammer”. “Some days, I’m a woman,” she sings, “some days, I’m a man.”
This theme is a key element of the album, but it doesn’t receive particularly compelling treatment. “Man of the Year” alludes to male identity, but its take on masculinity seems to boil down to a curious mish-mash of swagger, self-pleasure and oral hygiene: “Playing it any way I want/Swish mouthwash, jerk off”.
Virgin’s preoccupation with embodiment turns up elsewhere to better effect. The startling artwork is an X-ray of Lorde’s pelvis with a contraceptive coil: a transparent body, at once physical and immaterial. The coil points to the sexual encounters that recur in the songs. They are conveyed with candour and imagination. “Your helix is right through me,” Lorde sings of a lover’s DNA in “Clearblue”, a computerised a cappella (reminiscent of Bon Iver) that makes reference to a pregnancy test. “Soap, washing him off my chest” is the bravura opening line of “GRWM”, which stands for “grown woman”.
Suggestive associations are made between physical traces and the singer’s presence in her songs. “Let it break me down till I’m just a breath/Till I’m just a voice living in your head,” she intones in “Hammer”. Her singing is breathy and dramatic, shading into portentousness, an absorbing register. The electronic textures surrounding her — sinewy dance beats, precisely arranged distortion, tangy basslines, oscillating frequencies — are well designed. They have a tactile sense of weight and balance.
Crescendos illustrate personal growth, although the device gets overused. Lorde’s storytelling is less striking than her phrasemaking. But the songs are immersive. In contrast to the manufactured intimacy common in pop music’s song factories, they convey the real thing.
★★★★☆
‘Virgin’ is released by Universal
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