Virgin
Genre: Pop By: Lorde Released: June 27, 2025 Label: Republic
Lorde is back, and more pretentious than ever... but I kinda love it?
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Lorde, Man of the Year, 2025, video still. Courtesy Universal/Republic
Lorde’s Virgin is the antithesis of the clean girl aesthetic. It’s a refreshingly visceral and raw rejection of the trending conservatism that has come to define the last decade. Here, “virgin” refers not to chastity, but to the unadulterated, feral dimensions of womanhood and femininity. Virgin – as in pure, unrefined, and unscripted. On this record, Lorde interrogates her own entanglement with performed femininity, exploring themes of gender, sexuality, body image, identity, and love with jarring clarity.
Some will undoubtedly dismiss this foray into unvarnished territory as pretentious, but its arrival feels timely. Her last effort, 2021’s Solar Power, marked a sonic departure from the brooding, experimental textures that initially defined her and resonated with the disaffected. Released in the midst of pandemic fatigue, wildfires, and political unrest, it offered little in the way of catharsis, opting instead for breezy detachment over guttural reckoning. With Virgin, Lorde is at her most corporeal, digging her nails into the dirt – literally.
Lorde doesn’t mince words. Every lyric must justify its presence against the album’s sonically sparse backdrop. The opening track, “Hammer,” immediately cues the listener into the primal energy coursing through the record’s swift 35-minute runtime. Spurred by her decision to forgo hormonal birth control, the 28-year-old positions herself as both subject and observer of her body’s unregulated impulses: “Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation/When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Gender, too, becomes a shifting variable that is flexible, contextual, and self determined, as she sings: “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man.”
Lorde further examines her evolving sense of self on “Man of the Year,” vocalizing the tension between internal identity and external expectation. She wonders who could possibly love her as she “become[s] someone else/Someone more like [herself].” Though the man within emerges unexpectedly, Lorde welcomes his presence, expanding her own definition of what it means to be a woman. As gender continues to be a flashpoint in the sociopolitical landscape of the 2020s, Lorde does not shy away from the conversation. Her matter-of-fact attitude toward her own gender identity validates the quiet, often unspoken complexities of fluidity. She offers visibility and nuance without spectacle or apology. She simply is.
On tracks like “Current Affairs” and “Clearblue,” Lorde discards the polished choreography of female sexuality in favor of something more feral, hormonal, and instinctual. By relinquishing the need to be palatable, Lorde accesses a primal understanding of intimacy, one that is inseparable from her expanding perception of gender. Her lyricism is strikingly astringent, expressing: “He spit in my mouth like he’s saying a prayer” and “I feel you answer, my hips moving faster/I rode you until I cried.” She revels in the uncertainty and sheer possibility of surrender, freeing herself from the weight of intergenerational trauma and societal expectation in the process.
Though thematically rich, the latter portion of the album requires a more patient ear to appreciate its unconventional composition. The lyrics carry much of the emotional weight, as the instrumentation remains subdued, with few tracks offering a sense of resolution. “Shapeshifter” stands out as a high point, where the text painting is as evocative as the lyrical content.
Lorde closes on a quieter, more introspective note, confronting unhealthy habits she’s acquired over time. On “Broken Glass,” she examines her fractured relationship with her body, acknowledging the role societal pressures play in obsession with shrinking one’s self, both in size and presence. She grieves for the girl who once believed her most sacred form of virginity could be exchanged for worth. Now, Lorde has carved away everything that once obscured her, like Michelangelo revealing David.