Early fame, the evidence would suggest, is both blessing and curse. Few artists will know what it is like to have a global number one, as Ella Yelich-O’Connor, aka Lorde, did with her debut single, Royals, in 2013.
But then came the tricky question of what happened next. How could she follow up the overnight celebrity she achieved while still a teenager? Where could she go after Royals?
She went everywhere, in a way. Her LP Melodrama, from 2017, was a splurgy, let-it-all-out reckoning with early adulthood. It found her connecting with Jack Antonoff, producer of Taylor Swift, and in the process frying the brain of the hitmaker Max Martin, who concluded that her single Green Light “broke all the rules” in terms of its structure and tempo.
Melodrama was a hit, but the drama was only starting. That D-word arrived in earnest with the shadows-in-sunshine of Solar Power, a folksy phantasmagoria full of David Lynch weirdness that divided her fans.
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Lorde told The Irish Times this month that Solar Power was a process she had to go through – if only to come out the other side. It sounds like a lot of effort to go to. Still, you can appreciate the wisdom of her words when listening to Virgin, its glittery, gritty and fabulously absorbing follow-up. Here, triumphantly and irresistibly, is a brooding blockbuster as visceral and emotionally gory as its predecessor was darkly becalmed.
Since Royals, Lorde has emerged as one of pop’s pre-eminent shape changers. She has characterised Virgin as self-conscious reconnection with her foundational years as a pop star – with the wide-eyed adolescent who wrote Ribs and Team, and who became a global sensation.
A lot happens in a decade, however. Inevitably, then, her fourth album has a grown-up, lived-in quality absent from her early work. She’s only 28, but already there are miles on the clock. Lorde feels the weight of it on What Was That, a propulsive teaser release about learning to fully inhabit your body while overcoming an unhappy break-up.
Bad romances and physical manifestation of your trauma make for a rather abstruse pairing – even more so when taking into consideration the fact that Lorde has talked about using MDMA (name-checked in the chorus) to treat her anxiety, in particular her crippling stage fright.
Yet for all the tune’s esoteric qualities – few of us will microdose in order to overcome workplace anxiety – there is something readily comprehensible about the bone-deep nature of Virgin. That is the case whether Lorde is talking about going off her birth control or taking a pregnancy test, on Clearblue, or discussing her tomboyish qualities, on the menacingly woozy Man of the Year, a gothic weepy sure to take its place among the pantheon of Lorde ballads.
Amid all the yearning and gurning, much of Virgin is straightforwardly and fantastically relentless. Lorde goes retro electropop with a vengeance on If She Could See Me Now. Certain to become a future fan favourite, it is a slow-mo synthwave wonder and the closest the LP comes to the cyberpunk confessional energy of Girl, So Confusing, her collaboration with Charli XCX from 2024.
A work of many shapes and moods, Virgin sees catharsis turn to confessional on Favourite Daughter. It is a love letter to the singer’s poet mother that blends the blinking-in-the-sunlight yearning of Pure Heroine, Lorde’s first album, with a deep weariness of fame. (She has learned that it means more to her to be respected by her parents than to be cheered by strangers.)
She bares her heart in a different way on Current Affairs. It opens a dolorous Joy Division-style bass riff, the gloomy tone reflected in the lyrics (“Mama, I’m so scared ... I’m crying on the phone”). Slathered in angst and regret, the lyrics scan as a meditation on a fling gone wrong (“on the boat it was pure and true”). It’s a love song as noirish exorcism – as the best love songs always are.
In that conversation with The Irish Times Lorde agreed that Virgin had an almost “body horror” quality: it is tumultuous, fully in the moment and at times more about the texture than the lyrics. Rapturous, at times a little out of control, it’s scarily great fun and – this seems to have been the point all the time – the spiritual opposite of Solar Power. The light has faded, darkness has crept in and Lorde is looking to the stars and re-engaging with her sense of wonder.
