Before I start, I want to claim my rights to jump into the bandwagon of praising the Lorde,
because I wrote, more than a year ago, that it was time to bring back, amongst other 2014 icons,
Lorde (and, separately, Marina’s Electra Heart). Shortly after I said this, both of them announced
their upcoming albums, Virgin and Princess of Pop. Did I manifest this? Is this a recession
indicator? The world will never know.
Lorde has always had a way with words. I was fifteen when Pure Heroine came out, and having a
physical copy of the CD felt like a deep, intricate connection with the person who seemed to understand
everything I was going through. From the fears to the desires, the expectations and the need to find one’s
own identity, Lorde embodied all I wanted to be (and, in a way, everything I already was). “Not everyone
knows who I am, but I don’t really have casual fans”, she tells Rolling Stone as a description of the
response she evokes from her fans with her music.
Listening to her music always felt like reading her diary – extremely personal, but in a comforting way. I
would describe it as looking into clear, calm waters: mirror-like, but earthly, sublime, pure. Finding
yourself in someone else’s words is a magic that not many artists have, and it can only be achieved
through honesty: a true depiction of the self. This is why it is impressive for her to say that Virgin will be
her most honest work yet.
Lorde’s discography can only be described as the long-term, always-evolving portrait of a woman as she
grows older. We have, as an audience, accompanied her from her adolescence to her young adulthood,
step by step, as her introspective songs tell the story of a girl who is finding herself in a world where
nobody else seems to take the time to find the truth within themselves. Lorde has always been
characterised by her intense expression of emotion, poetic lyrics, and introspection. However, more than
ten years – and three albums – have passed since that initial birth of an icon, and her fourth album, Virgin, is now underway, to be released on June 27.
In the middle of an era of clean-girls, hygiene olympiads, and the internet’s recent obsession with diligent
and unattainable self-care routines, of people pretending they have it all together in terms of health and
wellness, the truthful verses of Lorde in the Girl, so confusing remix (from Charli xcx’s Brat, released last
summer) set a baseline as to where her next album may be directed. This track was an initial glance into
Lorde’s struggles with eating disorders, as a result of making herself small, both mentally and physically,
subverting to the world’s unstoppable need to contain women into boxes.
Her album’s lead single, What Was That, feels like a reprise of Pure Heroine and Melodrama: it tells the
story of a woman who tried to have it all together, who tried to be contained, but gracefully failed. Virgin
coming out four years after Solar Power, an album about finding peace and calm in New Zealand
beaches, is a representation of a generation who is obsessed with wellness, but buried deep down in
insecurities, self-loathing, and lies. I read somewhere: your mid-twenties are not a wellness retreat, and
Lorde, as many of us, is publicly growing out of the disguise of apparent peace and quiet – the quarter-life
crisis taking place as a sudden need for beach escapades. Virgin is not an opposite to that, but a direct,
contrasting response. Lorde describes the lyricism of Virgin as “right on the edge of gross”, a whole
chapter of her life contained in plain, transparent language. “The themes are always the same: a return to
innocence, the mysteries of the blood, an itch for the transcendental”.
In her recent public appearances and interviews, social media has played a part in guessing and labelling
what may be her new gender identity, pronouns, self-identification: are they non-binary now? Is he trans?
Is she still a she? The irony of being labelled even after openly expressing that she does not want to be
labelled is nothing else but a symptom of the world needing her album: we need the representation of a
woman who cannot be contained, who may be, occasionally, a man, and who may explore the fluidity, not
only of her gender, but of her existence as a human being.
She says, in a recent interview, that she was asked by Chappell Roan if she was non-binary now, to
which she responded: “I’m a woman except for the days when I am a man. There’s a part of me that is
really resistant to boxing it up”.
I believe we can expect from Virgin to be a declaration of body autonomy: Lorde navigating through
gender exploration, learning to inhabit her own body, taking up space, and finding that it all comes clearer
when you let yourself be transparent.
In her own words, this is a raw, sublime, and physical album, that will touch the topics of her recent break-up, as well as learning to be alone, and feeling like a teen again. What are your late twenties for, if not feeling like a teenager again, without shame?