Help! I’m Stuck in an X-Ray, and I Can’t Get Out!
A track-by-track review of Lorde’s new album, Virgin
Last Friday, the new New Zealand pop star Lorde (born Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor) released her highly-anticipated fourth album, Virgin. The record is only 34 minutes long, making it her shortest to date. (For comparison, her last LP, 2021’s anxiously breezy and underrated Solar Power, was 43 minutes long.) However, despite its relatively short run time, Virgin packs a primal punch unlike anything else in O’Connor’s discography. It is breathtakingly efficient, but it is also ruthless in pursuit of emotional truth. Co-created with producer Jim-E Stack, best known for his remixes in addition to his work with Kacy Hill prior, Virgin takes an unusually frank approach to Lorde’s brand of subversively wise pop. Leading up to Virgin, Lorde spoke about how “the magic lives close to the edge.” That kind of raw mentality reflects in the sometimes embarrassing lyrics (such as “Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation,” which we hear right out the gate). Many songs read as if they came from someone’s Notes app. That vulnerable quality is still this album’s strength. For the inaugural post of my (long overdue) blog, here is a track by track breakdown of this bizarre, wonderful, and uncomfortably tight new record.
Hammer: In the past, Lorde has sung about wanting a mood ring to tell her how she was feeling. “Mood Ring” was very “/hj” (half joking tone indicator). In other words, the satire she kept insisting upon is even less apparent now when she asks an “aura picture” in “Hammer,” to “tell [her] who [she is].” It’s this inability to define oneself/looking for identity in one’s surroundings (a mood ring, an aura picture) that is at once relatable and anxiety inducing. (If Lorde, one of our generation’s foremost pop stars, can not easily define herself, how could we? I realize this is a very big pedestal, but, nonetheless, it is one of the many pitfalls of celebrity.) The apparent lack of identity also partially explains Virgin’s broad, disarming strokes. (But more on that later.)
That criticism aside, “Hammer” is one of the strongest songs on the record. Just hearing “there’s a heat in the pavement/my mercury’s raisin’” with those buzzy synths gives me goosebumps.
What Was That: It’s telling of Virgin’s modus operandi that the single cover art references performance artist Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present. Abramović’s work primarily focuses on the literal presence of the artist to ground itself. Not to mention the deceptively ‘cheap’-looking/shot-on-iPhone, walking-slayfully-in-the-city music video that accompanies “What Was That.” Besides the (cliched yet artfully rendered) theme of discovering and rediscovering sexuality, Virgin is about being in awe of one’s existence—in all its messiness. For better and for worse. Let the chips fall where they may. Live in the moment. But what was that?
Shapeshifter: This is the one. The song that’ll put me to sleep and slip its way into my bloodstream. I playlisted it almost immediately after I heard the album. The garage beat. Her voice. The lyrics. “Shapeshifter” is the good stuff. Enough said.
Man Of The Year: I have a love hate relationship with “Man of the Year.” I find the melody grating (“Love me like this / Ohhh / Give me lightness”), but I’m intrigued by her newfound gender ambiguity. (The three duct tape strips are a very compelling image.) At the same time, the discussion of gender distracts from a thematic emptiness in the song’s uncertainty. Still, I find those hard, industrial drums at the end so so satisfying. The question of who is the “man of the year” is moot. The song is missing some key element. I’ll forget about “Man of the Year” (or I won’t) and later hear it on the radio, and I will remember the duct tape and the dirt.
Favourite Daughter: “Favourite Daughter”’s pacing is out of sync with the rest of the album. The song is too upbeat and wholesome(?) for Virgin’s approach to the rest of its subject matter. Additionally, the way Lorde says “ya” instead of “you” is distracting and confusing though it’s there for melodic reasons. Any analysis of this song’s lyrics inevitably dips into parasocial projection of her relationship with her mother and that puts me at further arm’s length given how supportive her mom, the poet Sonja Yelich, is on social media. “Favourite Daughter” is ambivalent, both positive and negative about Lorde’s relationship with her mother. I don’t know. I don’t want to necessarily know what happens behind the closed doors of celebrities’ private lives.
Lorde has said “Favourite Daughter” was the most difficult song to write, and I can hear the writing and re-writing in her voice and the kind of non-urgency in the synths. It’s hard to pin down exactly what I mean. The song sounds willed into existence, a throwaway (non)single that racks up streams.
Current Affairs: Simultaneously conceptual and emotional. The silver radiance of emotional aftermath, or the mediocrity of midday malaise (a dentist’s waiting room). I imagine “Current Affairs” in teenage girls’ playlists, and I feel sad—for the shortcomings of adolescence. Puberty is no one’s fault yet someone always gets hurt.
Clearblue: I can’t stop thinking about “Clearblue.” It reminds me of Bon Iver. It also feels trendy, i.e. the little vocal quirk towards the end sounds familiar (like a moment in Ellie Goulding’s “Start” or a more anonymous electropop song). Named for the pregnancy test, the song/interlude is a powerful excavation of sexual autonomy. However, its short length which is its superpower is also its downfall in that it leaves too much space afterwards, given the next song that follows.
GRWM: “GRWM” reminds me of “California,” in the sense that it is divorced from who Lorde is as a person, or how we know her as a pop star. It feels…beneath her, almost like it came from someone else. Yet there are some great moments in “GRWM,” such as that part where she repeats “wide hips” with that fuzzy bouncing synth.
“GRWM” suffers from the weirdly trite central refrain of “finally know what you wanna be / a grown woman in a baby tee” which makes one easily gloss over the subsequent verses suddenly describing said grown woman in strangely specific and vague, disorienting terms.
The “grown woman” / “get ready with me” pun of the title and first verse is lost in the song’s lack of depth. You have to grow up everyday getting ready in the morning?
The track’s shortness leaves so much empty space for what she’s not saying. Lorde’s longer songs like “Oceanic Feeling” and “Hard Feelings/Loveless” prove that her best writing can happen when she allows herself to breathe. (This criticism applies especially after “Clearblue.” She is whetting my taste for more and then shutting it down.)
Lorde has said that she cut a song that was her favorite because it “diluted her vision.” “GRWM,” to me, questions said vision with its triteness.
Broken Glass: Taking aside its lyrics, “Broken Glass” otherwise follows a ‘B song’ structure. Not in the sense that it is a B side necessarily, but more like its chorus and verse don’t read as strong first ideas. It is still a decent song discussing body image, which is important. I don’t hate it or love it.
If She Could See Me Now: I can not tell if there’s an inherent contradiction in “Hope you find another starlet, another red carpet/as for me I’m going back to the clay,” which is very much Lorde’s ethos, but does she really practice what she preaches, so to speak? I can’t fault her for being a pop star, that’s her job, but I question this messaging.
Anyway, “If She Could See Me Now” bangs. Screw the city lights. You’ll find me in the clay. The song can be a bit too self aware (“If this is crazy / then I guess I’ll take it”), but that doesn’t take away from how much it slaps. It’s empowering and immediate in all the right ways.
David: Unlike “GRWM,” “David”’s shortness belies its complexity. It is so tightly packed that Lorde is looking for every nook and cranny within its 3 minute runtime to tell a novel’s worth of story and recontextualize the album. (Is David the lover she chastises so much? The statue of Michelangelo’s ideals? Both?) “David” denies its easy rhyme scheme. What could have just as well been “I don’t belong to anyone but you” becomes the slightly awkward “I don’t belong to anyone — hoo!” Lorde is going out of her way to establish her independence. In the last few seconds, you can barely here her reference “the fountain,” which is also mentioned in passing in “Hammer,” an intentional note as she has confirmed. But what does the fountain really mean? The whole album is processing one’s relationship with oneself, one’s body, and others on the noisy streets of New York, looking for a foothold in anything, a park fountain, in the organized chaos.
Conclusion: An online friend of mine said Virgin was an album “anyone could make.” I hadn’t thought of Virgin that way initially, but he brought up a good point. For all of the trappings of “spiritual technology” and posturing as if she’s different than other pop stars, Virgin is missing something to push it to where Melodrama and Pure Heroine (her first two albums) are. (For the record, I have been a fan since 2013 and respect her work and how she approaches pop.) A sophomore slump is what a lot of artists go through after a very successful debut. I do not envy Lorde the task of following up two fantastic records in a row and catching up after her middling third. In the end, I can’t deny that Virgin feels incomplete. There’s more to the story, and I want to hear it.
Final verdict: 7.7/10
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