Review: Virgin by Lorde
growing up in the wrong proportions
Lorde grew up fast. In 2013, when she was 16 years old, the singles from her debut album Pure Heroine were played on the radio around the world every single day. These early songs, like “Royals” and “Team”, were built on Lorde’s distinct voice, which was given space to shine over minimalist instrumental tracks. In the lyrics, Lorde reflects on her suburban upbringing, both satirizing and romanticizing coming-of-age and aspirational wealth narratives. It’s both wise and naive, always endearing, and somehow written by a 16-year-old. It was an inspiring debut.
Four years later, in 2017, Lorde released her second album Melodrama. Melodrama is her party album. Like Pure Heroine, it feels very mature for her age. The lyrics are good, but not as transcendent as Pure Heroine; she sings about nightlife and how the party makes her feel. The instrumentals were where Lorde took a step forward. Every song on Melodrama is more sonically creative than Pure Heroine. Melodrama was played on alt-rock radio stations because its sound was comparable to well-crafted indie rock like The Strokes. Lorde showed she was a songwriter with a vision, not just a lightning-in-a-bottle teenager.
Both of these albums have aged well, growing beyond their initial reception. Lorde’s most famous song today, the coming-of-age-song “Ribs”, comes off Pure Heroine, but it was not initially popular in 2013. It slowly found its audience in the algorithmic Spotify and TikTok landscape we live in now, because it resonated with today’s youth.
In 2021, Lorde released Solar Power. It sounded different from her first two albums. Her distinct lower vocal register is rarely used. Instead, she uses an ethereal voice similar to Phoebe Bridgers’ on Punisher, which was popular a year before. The backing tracks are light and airy too. The new sound made it controversial with fans of her first two albums.
But I loved Solar Power. Lorde sings about hanging out on beaches in New Zealand, smoking weed in her hometown, and finding beauty in the natural world in a way that resonated with me. At the time I was doing similar things in my own hometown, in Illinois. It’s another mature album for her age. Lorde turns away from parties, choosing instead the sun and stability. She muses about children in “Oceanic Feeling”, speaks affectionately about her longtime boyfriend in “The Man With The Axe”, and writes beautifully about her dog that passed away in “Big Star”. I found the sound still great; Lorde has a unique vision for Solar Power that she totally achieves. This album feels like Joni Mitchell's 70s music pulled into the present, hippie culture blending with neohippie wellness Instagram culture in a striking way. But I get that the fans wanted something more like what Lorde had done before.
Now, in 2025, Lorde released her fourth album, Virgin. Virgin’s defining ethos is vulnerability. Its cover is an x-ray of Lorde’s pelvis, where her tiny metal IUD is visible, and the metal buttons on her blue jeans are visible. It shows vulnerable parts of her but not everything. It’s very creative; maybe the best part of the album.
My read is that Lorde was influenced by the success of Charli XCX’s Brat, the big album of last summer. There are vulnerable songs on Brat itself, and when Lorde was brought in for a remix track, “Girl So Confusing”, she wrote vulnerably about her friendship with Charli and her body image. The remix was positively received, especially Lorde’s lyrics. I think the success of the concept made Lorde want to do a whole album with that type of vulnerability. Or maybe she was already thinking about vulnerability, and the success of “Girl So Confusing” made her more confident.
The risk with centering an album around vulnerability is if the vulnerability doesn’t feel sincere, but that’s not the case on Virgin. The vulnerability feels authentic. Lorde writes openly about a fragile period in her life. In Virgin, Lorde has left the beaches of New Zealand for New York City, and broken up with her longtime boyfriend. She sings about casual sex, going out to bars in the city, and trying to find her identity again. She’s 27 but acting younger, and coming to terms with that.
Virgin has a song explicitly about acting younger, called “GRWM”. That’s a TikTok acronym for Get Ready With Me, but used in this context by Lorde to also mean “Grown Woman”. The central line in the song is “maybe you finally know what you want to be: a grown woman in a baby tee”. It’s a tongue-in-cheek self-acknowledgment of how it can be silly to act younger while growing older. The phrase “baby tee” makes that even more apparent, but Lorde owns that dissonance anyways.
Lorde has said in interviews about Virgin that she wanted to make music that only she can make. What this meant in practice was leaning into the successful and distinct elements of Pure Heroine and Melodrama. The opening tracks “Hammer” and “What Was That” are Lorde songs that go hard, full of her distinct sonic and lyrical tropes. She opens by letting the fans know she can still make music that sounds like the music they loved, not like Solar Power. In theory, this choice could be a weakness; retreating to past success after failed experimentation, but in my opinion Lorde dodges that too. Lorde’s return to her youth is part of the stylistic goals of this album; her retreat to her earlier style makes sense with how Lorde retreats to her youth throughout the lyrics of Virgin too.
At times it feels like Lorde is writing this for current NYU student teenagers, which is cute. That’s the demographic who liked her music before, but there’s a new generation now, because it’s been 8 years since Melodrama. The music video for the lead single “What Was That” was filmed publicly in Washington Square Park, near NYU. She namedrops New York City locations throughout the album, in a way that feels like a call to the youth of the city for those who aren’t there and mythologization of it for those who are. New York is also the perfect physical place to explore the idea of getting older but acting younger. It’s for the fans, but also for her, and that’s why it works for the fans.
The other way this album feels made for the fans, and for teenagers, is in the subject matter of the songs. I think the songs on Virgin are simpler to grasp than Solar Power. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The simplicity feels intentional, calibrated by Lorde to make the songs more universal.
“Favorite Daughter” and “If She Could See Me Now” are the most representative examples of this. “Favorite Daughter” is about struggling to live up to parental expectations, and “If She Could See Me Now” is a motivational song about recovering from a breakup. These two songs feel almost designed to be relatable for teenagers. These songs aren’t bad, but they stick with me less than Solar Power. Other songs on the album execute teenage accessibility in more fresh ways. “Broken Glass” is about struggling with body image, and “Clearblue” is about feeling less pure after casual sex. Both are also universal topics for young people, but more compelling songs than the first two, where it feels like Lorde is going through the motions a little.
The concept of making universally relatable art for young people isn’t flawed. I actually think it’s extremely admirable what Lorde is doing here. I just think it has to be executed well, with a lot of care to not feel condescending or shallow. Young people are very attuned to those things. One of the songs that young people seem to be resonating with the most is “Shapeshifter”, based on my anthropological research on TikTok and Twitter. “Shapeshifter” is not as neatly calibrated to be universal, but it lands with the kids because it feels raw and probing, more like older Lorde songs.
I guess my central criticism of Virgin is that it feels incomplete. It’s Lorde’s shortest album, only 11 songs. My read is that Lorde really wanted Virgin to come out this summer, to keep her four-year album cycles, and to try to claim the summer artpop spot that Brat charted. But I think Virgin could have used more time. I’ll compare to Bladee’s Cold Visions here, because I think about Bladee a lot. Cold Visions is also a vulnerable album made for the fans, but it’s so great because Bladee invested a ton of artistic care and time in the album. It’s an hour long, so many songs are good, and it’s so dense with ideas. I think Lorde had the talent and artistic vision to make Virgin an album of that level.
But I really can’t be too mean. What we got is a solid Lorde album. I think it’s the weakest of her four, but she set high standards with the other three. The world Lorde builds in Virgin is rich; the way Lorde thinks about youth and New York is interesting. And I love seeing Lorde’s attitude towards her art. I’m excited to see what she does next.
bro iv been waiting to hear what you think about this