{"id":20996,"date":"2025-06-28T05:29:11","date_gmt":"2025-06-28T05:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/20996\/"},"modified":"2025-06-28T05:29:11","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T05:29:11","slug":"lorde-virgin-album-review-pitchfork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/20996\/","title":{"rendered":"Lorde: Virgin Album Review | Pitchfork"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those experiences she\u2019s after are intensely physical, though not as glamorous or easily aestheticized as you\u2019d expect from a pop artist. Twenty seconds into opener \u201cHammer<\/a>,\u201d Lorde utters a word I\u2019d wager has never been heard in the Hot 100\u2014\u201covulation\u201d\u2014and follows it up with \u201cSome days I\u2019m a woman\/Some days I\u2019m a man,\u201d a striking, if uncharacteristically blunt, subversion of biological essentialism. On Virgin, her singing is visceral and sometimes\u2014there\u2019s no other word\u2014orgasmic. Her relationship to her own body is complicated by her history of disordered eating, which she references freely across the album. But in her telling, living in a human body is also sublime (\u201cThe mist from the fountain is kissing my neck\u201d) and cathartic (\u201cI rode you until I cried\u201d). And it\u2019s abject: It\u2019s cum on your chest and acid reflux from throwing up and peeing on a stick because you might be pregnant.<\/p>\n

That last vignette comes from \u201cClearblue,\u201d a spare swirl of vocoder melody \u00e0 la Imogen Heap<\/a>. It\u2019s all Lorde\u2019s voice, words running across her tongue like ribbons curling against a blade as she recounts a pregnancy scare that blurred the boundaries between intimacy and independence. The incident passes, becoming a precious reminder of her own vitality; the test a relic, lost to the trash. But the topic of motherhood remains potent. The presence of Lorde\u2019s mom, the poet Sonja Yelich, is felt across the album\u2014particularly on \u201cFavourite Daughter,\u201d a bubbly number where Lorde imagines her own career as the fulfillment of her mother\u2019s ambitions. Lorde\u2019s choice of album cover, too, is meaningful: Heji Shin, the photographer who X-rayed her pelvis, is perhaps best known for her raw images of crowning newborns<\/a>. Documents of the grotesque and generative potential of the human body, they can also be read as metaphors for the bloody labor of creativity.<\/p>\n

Now 28, Lorde can\u2019t be neatly mapped on the continuum of girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. This is the consequence of being known as a perennial wunderkind<\/a>, a sage since 16, and now also a sort of mother to her dozens of musical descendants. (She calls her fans her \u201ckids,\u201d too.) She gets at this state of multitude on \u201cGRWM,\u201d declaring herself \u201ca grown woman in a baby tee\u201d\u2014an objectively dumb lyric that she\u2019s just confident enough to pull off. The production here, as on much of the record, is minimal\u2014a rattling beat and some synth stabs, adding muscle but not bulk and pushing Lorde\u2019s voice and words to the foreground.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s long been her writing that telegraphs Lorde\u2019s capital-A artistry. Where someone like Charli XCX<\/a> is keen to move culture, and Addison Rae<\/a> is keen to put on a good show, Lorde is happy to sweat it out in the Notes app. The music\u2019s job, it seems here, is mostly to not get in her way. \u201cShapeshifter\u201d is a high mark, a lovely bit of text painting that starts with a skeletal garage beat, shaded in gradually until it hits you with a full bleed of color. This song moves; it mirrors the state of constant flux that Lorde is singing about. Virgin could stand to have more of that synergy\u2014production touches that are as freaky and unpredictable as the person at their center. Instead, there\u2019s the glitchy vocal fragments and oddball samples that we\u2019ve heard before. There\u2019s so much negative space, it feels almost like a tease, because it implies everything that could fill it.<\/p>\n

But that ecstatic sense of possibility\u2014of being many things at once, of following your impulses in all directions, all the time\u2014is the animating force of Virgin. Some would be cowed by the enormity of the prospect. Not Lorde: \u201cI swim in waters that would drown so many other bitches,\u201d she crows on \u201cIf She Could See Me Now.\u201d It\u2019s not hard to see why she\u2019s drawn to another stop on the Lorde tour of New York: Walter De Maria\u2019s Earth Room<\/a> (1977), a Soho loft filled with nothing but 250 cubic yards of dirt. Lorde recreated it in her video for \u201cMan of the Year<\/a>,\u201d where she binds her chest with duct tape and thrashes about in the soil, tapped into some elemental lifeforce. The original installation has been there for nearly 50 years; nothing grows. The whole thing is pregnant with possibility, blissfully abstract, ripe for interpretation. It feels like a portal to anywhere you want to go.<\/p>\n

All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.<\/p>\n

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