A necessary reading by a good friend, Riley Hansen, before you begin.

When Lorde emerged into the pop landscape back in 2013, you could see the ingénue label plastered on her forehead: a record deal at the age of 12, a string of singles on the Billboard charts, and a general field Grammy before she even graduated high school. I’d imagine a typical pop star’s career path can be easily traced back to when they go viral: their record label finds a way to make the most of the momentum now, while they’re still hot. For Lorde, however, she retreated into silence after her debut and would only come back when she had something to say. Lorde returns practically every American presidential cycle, and oftentimes her emergence is a capital M moment, like the resurgence of cherry blossoms in the nation’s capital in March. Unlike a lot of the pop heavyweights right now, whose annual album cycles practically suck up all the air in the room—extravagant campaigns leading up to the record’s release—the most you get out of Lorde is through internet sleuths (and I still hope that she has a Dev Hynes-produced record in the kitchen somewhere).

When I say Lorde creates a moment when she drops a record, you don’t have to look as far as the show at Washington Square Park in New York City that had to be shut down by police. The single that spurred this moment is aptly titled “What Was That,” a percussive-heavy banger that harkens more to the physical throbs of her often-stated magnum opus Melodrama (“since I was 17 / I gave you everything”). It is a very Lorde song, an anthem that moves, throbs, and yelps between the chorus, a track that tries to survey the hell of a couple of years we’ve all collectively had. The lead single of her records is always a call to arms, and it’s hard to deny how much of a moment she can be if she can summon her fans after exiting a 4-year hibernation.

It has been four years since Solar Power, a record that a lot of people see as a stain on her illustrious discography. I was among the people who found the record disappointing, waiting four years to hear slack campfire songs marketed as “satire” on wellness culture, but it wasn’t funny or biting enough to be satire and wasn’t sonically engaging enough to evoke the intense emotions that she has stirred so easily before. I found the record very shallow, hearing about a rich white woman complaining about the end of the world and almost eye-rolling as she preaches about how fame and smartphones are ruining her life. Admittedly, now, I’ve softened my ire because the album addressed a lot of topical issues for us: how we need to consume less and have empathy for the world and the people around us more, which is perhaps a big part of growing up. Regardless, there is no need to dwell because she chucks this out of the window with Virgin’s first song and third single, the jagged banger “Hammer,” with the couplet: “It’s a beautiful life so why play truant? / I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.”

You can find the seeds of Virgin planted with her Charli XCX collaboration “Girl, so confusing (Remix)” where, within 3 minutes, hundreds of Tumblr accounts were resurrected. Lorde has never shied away from the brutal honesty when it comes to her own body, but it is almost incandescent to hear this type of candor, especially as she reflects on how it affected relationships around her. Anger and resentment are universal feelings, and feelings you could quite easily lobby at the people you love. It’s an easy story, yes (who knew you could rebuild friendships by communication and honesty?), but it’s a meaningful story in our era of “you don’t owe anyone anything,” “protect your peace,” a prevailing loneliness epidemic, and also how women are pitted against each other pointlessly every day. The iconic line “Let’s work it out on the remix” practically shimmers in this day and age as we spend time undoing it all.

Broadly, Virgin follows similar paths, as it feels like pages torn from a 20-something’s collection of voice notes and diary entries, filled with reverence for her mother and living in the moment. The second single, “Man of the Year,” is a by-the-books Lorde ballad: her alone in a room with a single piano note with a desperate plea into a sea of black. Foremother ballads like “Liability” rarely erupt, but the soft whispers rumble and pierce themselves in a room filled with medical-grade syringes as you hear the titular man herself riding off a high of making peace with her body. Even though it’s a spare song, it’s one of the most evocative on the record. The vocoder-powered track “Clearblue” is right on the nose: her voice is filtered through a 2010s AutoTune machine as a pregnancy test spirals out to a meditation on her biological clock, unprotected sex, and inherited trauma, even if the presentation makes you wince a bit. Disappointingly, the record falls into the recent trend of pop records being short, clocking in at 34 minutes, but it helps by making the record a lot more immediate in its pleasures. There is a lot of beauty to marvel at between every track, and I found myself drawn to the new wrinkles in her trademark sound.

The most effective tracks in this record for me were the ones that sounded edgier than expected or the ones that had the brazen candor that made 17-year-old me fall in love with her the first time. Arguably, the best track on the record is “Shapeshifter.” Entering the song feels like breaking into a room filled with smoke, and the lyrics unpack the ways you tear yourself apart and relinquish control in efforts to be seen and loved. The songwriting is an emotional wallop, and the track moves like coasting down a suburban back road with the windows down. “Broken Glass,” a companion piece to “Girl, so confusing (Remix),” is a solid marriage between her intimate songwriting and instincts for a pop anthem. It rolls into its chorus with a catharsis that seems reserved for the angsty tunes of your teenage years, and you can easily see it as the track where she points her microphone to the audience and lets them sing the song back to her. 

When the record dropped in the early days of summer, I admittedly was having trouble feeling it. I found her still echoing Solar Power’s out-of-touchness when she waxed poetic about Pamela Anderson’s exploitative sex tape and how her takedown of gender essentialism in 2025 was “Some days/some days I’m a man.” But it wasn’t the same derision I had for Solar Power, which was fueled by my 21-year-old angst. I found that 25, the year that you officially have your developed frontal lobe, was when I realized the importance of showing a bit of grace, and saying “fuck it” and surrendering to the thrill and plasticity of it all. It’s easier to see the record as another chapter of “rich white woman flailing around,” but then you read the infamous PowerPoint and realize this is a young woman who grew up in front of a screen and wasn’t necessarily protected from greedy eyes and abusive power dynamics. You realize that when you build a fanbase off of teenage ennui and dismembering yourself in your Notes app for the entire world to see, you perhaps attract a thrall of fans that will be harsher to you than your own mother ever will be. In the center of it all is a girl who was told she was a beautiful prodigy at a young age, while everyone around her starts tearing apart her body. It’s easy to judge her, but it might help to see Virgin as a story of survival and the way that there are people you love around you who might be surviving an eating disorder and reflecting on their bad relationships. It’s easier to resent someone than grapple with meeting them halfway.

I always loved the ending track of a Lorde album. When I was 13, “A World Alone” captured that specific teenage romance so well, a perfect soundtrack to a romance that felt like the end of the world because that was your first time experiencing love. At 17, “Perfect Places” was sublime because the house party was over, and all you wanted was for the noises to stop. At 21, “Oceanic Feeling” felt like staring at the horizon of an endless ocean, and making peace with how fruitless and naive hoping for an answer to your question is. “David” is a spare track, nothing but Lorde and cavernous space that is filled with nothing besides the looming specter of Bon Iver’s pensive brooding. It is the first time you hear Lorde sound so unsure, a far cry from the starry-eyed 23-year-old who believed she saw and knew it all. Even when she croaks, “Am I ever going to love again?” it isn’t a plea to an abyss but rather making peace with how our entire lives are going to be a constant metamorphosis. 

Autumn arrived a few days ago, and I think this record has come and gone from most people’s conversations. When she is done with her current tour, I see her disappearing into the background once again for a few more years. I imagine most people are critical of the record because it sounds nothing like her supposed highs of Pure Heroine or Melodrama, but I argue that her music has always chased timelessness by capturing a specific era of your life in a bottle. It’s impossible for her to recreate that chaotic, hopeless love that she sang about so much a decade prior because we’re just not teenagers anymore. You can’t go back, but you can look back and cherish where you were in a particular moment. Virgin will become a time capsule, and it won’t be long before I pull it out of my record collection, let the sounds fill the room, and watch the music echo with who I was. For some, the moment was that night in Washington Square Park as fans swarmed around her, but for me, twenty-five has all been spackled by these moments of keeping people close when I feel as if I’m reminded every day that tomorrow is never promised and that survival is an uphill battle.