Lorde's Virgin and the Versions of Me

2009 me'd be so impressed

I was looking for a savior.

I was seventeen, afraid of getting older and facing the world and uncovering truths about myself I would have rather kept buried under the dirt in my parents’ backyard. I was reluctantly suburban and painfully strange, halfway to space and terrified of being found out. I knew I didn’t fit into the culture, and a carefully curated counter-culture was just beginning to take shape on my Tumblr dashboard. I wanted skinny jeans. I wanted a t-shirt with OBEY on it. I wanted to shave the sides of my head and dye my hair blonde like Famous YouTuber, Troye Sivan.

I learned about music from Tumblr, from cool girls in my grade who smoked weed, and from books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I bought my first vinyl record (Days Are Gone by HAIM) at Urban Outfitters while wearing Toms and non-prescription glasses. I was carving out the contours of my identity through deep-fried Instagram filters and Doc Marten blisters.

I was starting my senior year of high school and brutally aware of the burning distance between who I was and who I knew I’d become.

Pure Heroine was the start of a roadmap.

It was unmistakable, Lorde was the artist of my lifetime. It didn’t take much to cement that title. Her music wasn’t just something I listened to; it shaped the way I understood longing, apathy, obsession, joy, resentment. It taught me how to move through moments I didn’t yet know I was living. Songs about staying home alone, about driving down tree-lined streets with your only friend, all of the tiny bruises of suburban adolescence.

Since then, every record arrived like a storm. Melodrama and the bone crush of summer love freezing over in Manhattan. Solar Power’s sun-drenched surrender of faith and fight into something fleeting and free. The timelines synced up. The stories were always the same. It was as if I experienced everything Lorde wrote about, as if the songs were made exclusively for me. I’ve been writing about this since my freshman year of college.

In reality, Lorde’s been a roadmap. Not to where I’m going, but to where I’ve already been. Each album finds me just after I’ve lived it, like she’s picking through the debris and stitching language around the mess. Her music doesn’t predict my life; it narrates the aftermath. The things I thought were unremarkable until I heard them sung out loud. She’s never handed me answers, but she’s made the feelings make sense. And every time a new record drops, I brace for impact, because I know I’m about to understand something I hadn’t yet admitted to myself. I’m about to see the past few years for what they truly were.

So when the signs started appearing—when the Instagram icon changed to a $200 anodized water bottle, when the snippet was posted, when she called a crowd to Washington Square—I knew what was coming. Not just a new album, but a new language for something I hadn’t yet put into words. A new soundtrack for a part of my life still in bloom.

Still, Virgin felt like foreign territory. After releasing Solar Power, a seminal, albeit contentious, album about summer in New Zealand in which she disavowed technology, Lorde pulled back. Disappeared. As she tends to. Her digital and physical presence tapered off once the tour wrapped. Stans like myself were left with scraps: a cryptic Instagram story, a blurry subway selfie. Proof she was still out there. Like Bigfoot.

Suddenly, we were being fed. Lorde was on TikTok. She was posting to Instagram. She had a phone number to text. She was interviewed by Jake Shane. She was more online than she’d been since her Tumblr days—and yes, it felt like marketing. But it also felt like something was shifting. The rollout was less precious, heavily Brat-inspired, and (at times) painfully honest. Lorde was done hiding behind symbolism. Everything pointed toward a rawer, more direct record. She was naked, exposed, shot on iPhone. No mythology. No soft-focus epiphany. Just the work.

So what did we get?

Virgin isn’t just Lorde’s rawest record—it’s her most revealing. Below, I’ve unpacked each track, not as a critic, but as someone who's prepared to let these songs cling to me in the quiet moments, fill the gaps, and say what I couldn’t.

1. Hammer: The final promotional single and the opening track of the album, Hammer begins exactly where the Virgin era first took root: Washington Square Park. It’s a song about sex and the city, less romantic than The Louvre but just as charged. It feels like a deliberate pivot from the Lorde we last saw on Solar Power, the version of her who tossed her phone into the ocean in pursuit of transcendence. Now she’s holding her iPhone by the water, fully re-engaged with the world.

   “The mist from the fountain is kissing my neck / The liquid crystal is in my grip.”

   That line collapses the old mythology. She’s not running anymore. She’s on TikTok. Still, she hasn’t completely left behind the girl in yellow linen, singing about getting her aura photographed at Magic Jewelry in Chinatown. And thank god for that.
   

   Hammer is New York City in a heatwave: sweaty, sexy, urgent, and primal. And that is Virgin.

   

   An aura photo taken of me in 2018.

2. What Was That: I listened to What Was That on repeat for an hour and a half the night it came out. As the debut single from Virgin, I knew it needed a moment. I walked from Bushwick to Greenpoint and back, passing every place I’ve lived in New York. The song felt like watching the past few years of my life in flickering snapshots. Like Supercut, but without the shimmer of teenage romanticism.

   I let the music crystallize the moment. I flipped through my own biography, trying to find the people, the places, the situations I could apply to the lyrics. I was searching for a deeper way to feel it. And then something shifted. I felt in touch with the future instead. I saw myself looking back on that moment, on how fiercely I needed to feel something, and realized that’s what makes Lorde’s art special to me.
   

   It connects me with every version of myself I’ve ever been.

   

   The best cigarette of my life.

3. Shapeshifter: A song about casual sex, about changing yourself for approval, about bending. I was on a walk yesterday when the lyrics hit me so hard I had to stop in place and close my eyes for the crescendo.
   
   The past few years of my life have been, honestly, pretty scarred by the act of oversharing on the internet. I’ve watched strangers pick me apart, piece by piece, sifting through my personality for flaws, eager to draw comparisons or make judgments. Eventually, I pulled back. I started putting less of myself out there. I tried to shift shape into something less recognizable, something safer, something that wouldn’t sting when it got torn apart.

   
   This song is a gut-punch. It’s the suffocating crash of buried feelings unearthed. It’s facing the consequences.

   If I'm fine without it, why can't I stop?
   Everything I want speeding up my pulse
   I don't sleep, don't dream at all
   Give 'em nothing personal
   So I'm not affected

4. Man Of The Year: This song is heavy. The production and vocals in the first part of this song remind me of Kurt Cobain. It admittedly is not on the top of my list for the album, but that doesn’t mean anything. Usually the songs I pay the least attention to on Lorde’s album end up being the ones I love the most as the years go on. Here’s to breaking open more parts of ourselves and letting more light in as we grow with this music.
   

5. Favourite Daughter: An instant classic. The kind of song you hear once and already know every word to. It’s a banger in the truest sense: punchy, confident, emotional devastation carefully diluted by an incredible melody. She is Robyn’s daughter, after all. So many pop girls are trying to make their Dancing On My Own — that aching, glittering anthem of loneliness you can scream in the club. But Favourite Daughter doesn’t try to replicate the formula. It inherits the spirit without imitation.

   After the emotional excavation of the first few tracks, this song arrives like a massive exhale. It isn’t trying to be delicate. It’s big, loud, honest. Exactly what we’ve come to expect from Lorde. Songs about things we don’t talk about. Therapy music that doesn’t leave you sadder than when you found it.

   The whole album does this. She meets you in your sadness and lifts you somewhere new. Maybe you’re still sad, but you’re self-assured.

   

6. Current Affairs: I’ve said it a million times: everyone wants their C,XOXO moment. Lorde finds hers in the most fitting location — once again — in Washington Square Park. Current Affairs is a cocktail of emotional devastation, scaled-back production, and one of the most unhinged samples in recent pop history. The track is so much more than a line from Morning Love, but it’s still hard to walk away from it without hearing Dexta Daps echoing in your head:

   “Girl, your pussy good, it grip me good a me fi tell you.”

   The sample is a rupture. A clash of tones that somehow makes total sense. Maybe because we’ve all been there: alone in a crowded room, surrounded by bodies moving to a song that couldn’t feel less relatable. Processing trauma at the club.

   I hope more artists try songs like this, especially in the age of nonstop samples.

   

   Washington Square Park, 2018

7. Clearblue: I’ve always gravitated toward scaled-back production. I listen to music for lyrics. For the quiet truths that get buried in bigger sounds. Clearblue is one of those songs that feels like a gift.

   I’ve talked to a few of my girlfriends about Clearblue, and about the album as a whole, especially how clearly it speaks to the experience of being a woman. That clarity stood out, particularly given how much of the rollout focused on Lorde’s expanding relationship to gender.

   This is a song about unprotected sex. About the mundane, terrifying rituals we rarely name. It is about making something sacred out of ordinary fear. It is self-mythologizing and scientific at the same time. Lorde, often such a cerebral artist, has found root in the body — in its vulnerability, its rituals, and its cycles.
   

8. GRWM: Giggling and kicking my feet. This one feels like a theme song.

   My whole life and all of my work is in conversation with my inner teenager. That is part of what connects me so deeply to Lorde. There is a running joke that she "can’t stop singing about being 17," but, girl, same. There is something worth celebrating about aging. About coming into yourself, learning to love the things you once hated about your body and your brain. Owning the shit you were crying about in middle school.

   Pink galaxy left undressed
   2009 me'd be so impressed
   Back when the stolen spirits went straight to the head
   Maybe you'll finally know who you wanna be

9. Broken Glass: Another moment of Lorde at her best. We first heard whispers of this song in the Girl, so confusing remix.

   I tried to starve myself thinner but then I gained all the weight back.

   That line feels like a primal release when you’re screaming it in a nightclub or a stadium. There is something so relieving about the bluntness of it. The way it cuts through silence around something so taboo. Broken Glass doesn’t flinch. It names the feeling directly and without apology.

   As someone who has also “lost my freak” about my body, this song is catharsis.
   

10. If She Could See Me Now: My favorite on the album currently. There are so many reasons I love this song I cannot possibly form them all into one congruent statement. The Suga Suga interpolation, the concept of ancient voices echoing through SoHo, listening to a song until it’s just a piece of music. Every single line is perfect.
    Again, we’re speaking to a younger self. Again, it feels like a theme song. I am so grateful to have Lorde’s music. I am so grateful to have a Lorde song that makes me excited to go to the gym.

    

11. David: One of the most heartbreaking pieces of music I’ve ever listened to. I am so sorry that Lorde had to go through the things she has processed in order to create art as powerful as this, but I am so grateful for her willingness to share her learnings with us. The breakdown is so massive it feels like a ride. The song ends with two spoken lines of instruction, bringing us, once again, back to Washington Square, locking the album in as a true ode to New York. To grief. To sex. To transformation. To rebirth.

    “Tell it to the rock doves, sing it to the fountain.”

Washington Square Park, 2017