Lorde’s ‘Virgin’: Songs Ranked Review

If the explicit sample of Jamaican veteran Dexta Daps’ 2014 single “Morning Love” didn’t make it clear, “Current Affairs” is an evocative sex rumination, full of spit, moans, underwear and beds on fire — but just as immediate is Lorde’s wounded delivery, with several syllables elongated as she tries to navigate physical and emotional entanglements. “Current Affairs” works as a different shade of Lorde’s pop songwriting; simply put, she’s never delivered a chorus quite like this one.

A little over a year after The Tortured Poets Department, Lorde riffs on the idea of healing from a breakup at the gym, although she’s far from down bad: “Yesterday,” she asserts, “I lifted your body weight.” “If She Could See Me Now” tackles disassociation within a toxic relationship, moving on from memories by replaying them over and over until the pain has been sucked out; the synthesizers mirror the healing, opening as a dissonant thud before smoothing out into an airy chord progression.

The ballads on Lorde’s previous album somehow haven’t been as quiet, or as loud, as “Man of the Year”: the song’s opening pairs her voice with a plucked bass string and nothing else, allowing the pop star to glide through melismas and wax poetic about embracing gender fluidity, but then things ramp up to a buzzing, ecstatic cacophony in the final 45 seconds before the song collapses. With “Man of the Year,” Lorde has complemented the frank subject matter with an arrangement that’s just as daring — this will be the one that bowls people over when performed live. 

Lorde began her first album by singing, “Pretty soon, I’ll be getting on my first plane”; a dozen years have passed, and she now calls New York City home, half a world away from the country where she grew up. Yet as Lorde sings to her mother over the blown-out drums and stray production effects of “Favourite Daughter,” “Everywhere I run, I’m always runnin’ to ya”: she’s still chasing her parent’s approval all this time later, and giving her audience a more in-depth portrait of her upbringing and familial bonds.

Lorde closes out Virgin with its most vulnerable moment: she gets close to the microphone as the production falls away, and repeats, “Am I ever gonna love again?” The question follows a caustic examination of a partner who failed her, and the realization that her identity doesn’t belong to another person — and yet, after all the fluttering sound effects stop circling her voice, she’s still left with that six-word question. “David” works well as a closer, stripping away all artifice to show that, even in a moment of intense self-discovery, there are no easy answers for Lorde.

Lorde has talked about the desire for Virgin to convey a greater sense of physicality, and “Hammer” opens the album with an urgent, sinewy buzz, before Lorde eventually lets the propulsion of the production serve as the song’s hook. In between, she expresses the freedom of feeling human with succinct clarity: “I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers / There’s peace in the madness over our heads,” she sings.

Immediately following a pair of songs about sex complexities on the Virgin track list, Lorde turns to face herself on “GRWM,” recalls of one the most joyful moments of her childhood, and wonders when she will finally feel like a grown woman. Beginning with soft keys and lilting melodies that would have sounded at home on Melodrama, “GRWM” comes into its own by its first chorus, where the warmth of Lorde’s voice is juxtaposed with crushed, harshed-buzz percussion and swirling, technicolor synthesizers. 

None of Lorde’s lead singles play it remotely safe — even “Royals,” the most traditional of the four, upended expectations for how hollowed-out a smash hit could sound — but “What Was That” is particularly improbable as an anthem, considering that its primary hook is a squiggly post-chorus instrumental, its beat keeps changing shape, and the first word in the chorus is “MDMA.” Within the context of Virgin, though, “What Was That” hits even harder than as a standalone single, with Lorde’s post-breakup liberation setting the table for the even more revealing courses to come.

In under two minutes, Lorde presents a vivid, emotionally fraught scene of sexual ecstasy and the post-coitus uncertainty involving a pregnancy test; timelines and feelings overlap, the generations of women before Lorde exist within her blood during a pivotal moment, her voice is heavily process and she repeats, “I’m free, I’m free,” before knowing exactly what she might be. Sparse and startling, “Clearblue” is placed as a lynchpin moment on the thematic journey of Virgin — once you hear it, it’s hard to imagine this project without it.

Throughout Virgin, Lorde leans toward choruses that are either comprised of very few words or none at all, allowing simple messages and their corresponding arrangements to speak for themselves. “Shapeshifter,” a searingly effective admission of using sex as a means of acceptance, is an exception — Lorde uses the hook to list the several versions of herself that have existed in relation to romantic partners — but within the verbose recollections, two phrases are repeated, “I’m not affected” and “I just wanna fall,” that slice to the heart of the song. If “Shapeshifter” lacks flash compared to other moments across Virgin, the song makes up for with maturity and world-building.

If you’re half-paying attention, “Broken Glass” might sound like the most traditional pop song on Virgin, with its thumping beat, elastic synths and muted verses leading into an upper-register eruption on the chorus. Yet every inch of the song is densely packed with personal devastation, as Lorde recounts the sadness, self-loathing, addictive qualities and hopelessness associated with counting calories and obsessing over appearance. “Broken Glass” may be one of the best songs about eating disorders and body dysmorphia ever recorded, but it’s also an A-plus anthem that’s worthy of Lorde’s upper-tier arsenal. If the entirety of Virgin represents a hard-fought reclamation, “Broken Glass” is its crowning achievement.