Virgin

That ecstatic sense of possibility—of being many things at once, of following your impulses in all directions, all the time—is the animating force of Virgin.

The result is nearly 40 minutes of undeniable pop bangers and jagged synth flashes where Lorde wipes parts of her past clean and makes room for the adult she has crystallized into.

Powerful, moving, personal but universal – and packed with bangers.

Virgin may not be Lorde’s most polished album, but it’s certainly her most compelling and revealing

Virgin doesn’t find Lorde back in her finest, most exhilarating form. But it’s a record that sees her heading in that direction.

On Virgin, she is transcendentally witchy, harmonizing with herself both literally and spiritually, a pop star in the throes of creative rebirth.

There are moments where the production feels slightly misjudged. .... But ultimately, ‘Virgin’ is a vibrant combination of Lorde’s best qualities, and then some.

It’s rare that an artist peaks twice in their career, but ‘Virgin’ accelerates to equal climaxes which it was widely, and wrongly, assumed only fan favourite album ‘Melodrama’ could reach.

Virgin is a complicated record. Its songs confuse me. They anger me. They inspire me. I want to untangle their motifs yet never want to hear some of them ever again. .... This is Lorde naked but nearly full.

The songs here are destined to linger on Lorde’s setlists for a long time, from the triumphant ‘If She Could See Me Now’ through to the addictive, restless groove of ‘Favourite Daughter’. A thrilling comeback that puts Lorde’s trajectory to the stars back on track.

Lorde’s tasteful embrace of fluidity in expression and refusal to slide into any conclusive assumption is Virgin’s most compelling strength. Even if the music’s painfully minimalistic and uneventful, her voice is a hurricane with guttural words as its generous source of energy.

Compared to the present-tense immediacy of, say, “Green Light,” too much of “What Was That?” happens in the past. As such, the song, like many on Virgin, fails to provoke a visceral reaction. .... When the album’s production, vocals, and lyrics are in perfect harmony, the results are sublime.

It is, in the main, an album of fits and starts, notions that don’t pan out — her most piecemeal work to date.

There’s just something slightly underdeveloped about the thing as a whole, as if Lorde was excited to excise these meditations and get them into some interesting musical passages.

Virgin is an album so earnestly, painfully vulnerable you can almost see straight through to the blood and guts. It’s not always polished or pretty, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s alive.

“Man of the Year” marks the album’s turning point. .... Maturity requires sacrifice, which, throughout her fourth album, Lorde discovers by separating herself from the person the world sees and often expects.

While it may not break entirely new ground, this album’s embrace of mordant textures and restrained warmth – weaponised on album closer and sonic bath David – cements it as consistently compelling and quietly brilliant.

It’s a treat to hear Lorde attack some of these ideas [The ways that trauma reshapes our relationship to our own bodies, how intimacy can become both salvation and terror, and the complex intersection of desire, vulnerability, and self-destruction that defines so much of womanhood] with maturity and nuance, and many of the songs bring restrained-but-engaging sonics to match. But the final product, unfortunately, leaves the listener a bit wanting.