Written by Yassmin Elmouzaieg
There are albums you like. There are albums you love. And then there are albums that feel like they’ve crawled inside your ribcage and rewired your nervous system. For me, Virgin is the latter.
Lorde’s latest release isn’t just another chapter in her already genre-defining discography but it’s a mirror, a scalpel, a full-body X-ray of identity, inheritance, and heartbreak. It’s an album that doesn’t just reflect a new era of her artistry, but somehow manages to reflect the eras of my own life too.
Lorde has always had this ghostly talent for arriving exactly when I need her. When Pure Heroine dropped, I was a teenager straining against suburbia, convinced my world was too small for the thoughts in my head. Melodrama came when I was spiraling through heartbreak, shouting “Perfect places!” into the night like it could save me. Solar Power was a quieter, slower album for long walks, solo beach days, that post-burnout numbness. And now, Virgin is here, a piercing, stripped-back, achingly raw record that feels tailor-made for every version of myself I’ve ever tried to escape.
From the very first notes of “Hammer,” Lorde sets the tone. “I might have been born again / I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” it’s a mission statement. She’s not presenting a polished self. She’s standing in the rubble of who she used to be, asking what comes next. There’s something almost defiant in how vulnerable it all is. The production is sparse, the vocals often warped or left trembling in silence, and the lyrics cut so close they leave bruises.
Take “Clearblue.” Easily one of the most haunting tracks she’s ever released. “There’s broken blood in me / it passed through my mother from her mother down to me,” a lyric that froze me the first time I heard it. No backing beat. No harmony. Just Lorde, alone in the void of generational pain, holding a line of ancestry. That moment wrecked me not just because it’s devastatingly honest, but because it’s so familiar. That quiet ache we inherit, the trauma we don’t choose. This is the kind of song you only write if you’ve been brave enough to bleed for it.
But Virgin isn’t just about Lorde’s interior world. It’s about mine too. It’s about all of ours. The way “Favourite Daughter” slips into the anxiety of being the good girl, the people-pleaser, the high-achiever. The way “Current Affairs” tangles sex, shame, and power into a slow-burning anthem of emotional survival. The way every outro across the album lingers, like Lorde doesn’t want to end the conversation but rather she wants to let it ring out, unresolved and real.
Those outros deserve their own moment. They’re not just the end of a song but the echo of something bigger. On “David,” the final track, the cinematic production swells before Lorde let’s go completely. It doesn’t wrap things up with a neat bow. It crumbles. And in the crumbling, it frees something. That’s the genius of Virgin, the way it resists the temptation to resolve, and instead leans all the way into discomfort, transparency, and transformation.
The transparency, of course, isn’t just sonic. It’s literal. The album cover, which is a blue-tinted X-ray of Lorde’s pelvis, her IUD clearly visible, is maybe the most radical image she’s ever released. It says: “Here I am. All of me. Even the parts that aren’t pretty. Even the parts that hurt. There’s no performance here. Just truth.”
And somehow, even in all this stillness, the record explodes. Not in the typical pop way, no massive drops or glittery hooks but in waves of emotional climax. “Broken Glass” practically begs to be screamed in a sweaty club, even as it unpacks body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and the societal violence of being a woman who wants too much. There’s a version of this record that could’ve been delicate. But Lorde, in all her genius, makes it unignorable.
She samples the noise of her life including the silence, the tension, the longing and turns it into something symphonic. The sample on “Current Affairs” is a perfect example: distorted, submerged, urgent. It gives the whole track the energy of a voice note you weren’t meant to hear or maybe one you’ve been trying to send
There’s something spiritual about the way she makes music. It doesn’t feel manufactured. It feels channeled. Like she’s pulling these truths from some deep, ancestral well. And that’s why this album doesn’t just sound good but it feels important.
Virgin is a rebirth, yes. But it’s also an autopsy. It tears everything open, the myths, the personas, the old protections and asks: what’s left when you stop pretending? The answer, in Lorde’s case, is staggering honesty, haunting lyrics, and production that knows exactly when to hit hard and when to disappear completely.
For all its sadness, this album doesn’t wallow. It transcends. It sheds. It survives.
So here I am again, another version of me, another version of her. Crying to Lorde in the middle of the night, grateful that somehow, through all our evolutions, we still find each other.
