wow, a proper album review of Lorde's 'Virgin'

In The Parent Trap (1998), the nefarious would-be stepmom Meredith Blake calls herself "someone who got their [12-year] molars very early in life." This is a hilarious way to describe precociousness, and it reminds me of how everyone treated Lorde when she blew up at age sixteen. No one ever accused Lorde of being a late molar grower. Everyone called her an old soul, which is a tricky label to bear as a teenager, and even trickier to maintain as one inevitably gets older.

Lorde has spent the past twelve years making music about the distance between how old she is, how old she's allowed to act, and how old she actually feels. Her most popular songs channel a specific kind of high-octane late-adolescent catharsis, the kind some people spend the rest of their lives pining for or chasing after. I'm the type of chick who spent her sophomore year of high school writing poems about being nostalgic for freshman year of high school, so obviously Melodrama has a permanent place hanging (down the back) in my personal Louvre. And Solar Power was a sunny stoner album on its face, but beneath the indica fog was a bitter friction, an exhausted rejection of the concerns of her industry-trapped peers: women who burn sage, men who do too much cocaine, kids in line at the Supreme store. "All the music you loved at sixteen you'll grow out of," Lorde sang, and everyone who fell in love with Lorde as teens went, noooooo, waiiittt.

Now Virgin is a Saturn return album for someone who seems like she had already had her Saturn return a long time ago. Lorde is 28 right now. I remember being in my late twenties. (It wasn't that long ago.) It was the age where I felt like I needed to make a lot of big decisions, and each big decision felt like a big iron door slamming shut forever. A heavy time. I did a lot of drugs about it, and it sounds like Lorde is doing that too.

Virgin makes some of the same metallic, jolie-laide electronic production choices as Melodrama, but doesn't have that euphoric hanging-your-head-out-the-moving-car thing that Melodrama did...nor should it! To me the album is all about knowing you're still capable of adolescent highs ("I become her again / Visions of a teenage innocence / How'd I shift shape like that?"), while also dragging around the weight of earned wisdom, the knowledge of your limitations, the history of everything that made you who you are. Melodrama was all about doing the random pressed pill handed to you at a party; Virgin is still a commitment to a certain kind of roll, but Lorde has tested her MDMA first.

I keep thinking about the album as being introverted. The drums are muted, the instrumentals turn in on themselves, the vocals get swallowed up in airless pockets of pure space. There's not quite a release on the level of "Supercut" or "Green Light," and anything that comes close—the crescendo at the end of "Shapeshifter, the stuttery chop of "David"— gets snuffed out before it can open up.

Within that pressurized cabin of a sonic palette, the lyrics are extra-corporeal, often downright sticky. Lorde pees on a pregnancy test, pierces her ears, "jerk[s] off," welcomes someone else's spit in her mouth, and showers away bodily fluids. She is not being shy about the kind of life she's leading. Hmm, maybe the album is not so much introverted as just plain internal. Hence the x-ray imagery. Hence the shout out to ovulation, which is of course as internal as you can get: a possible future person, in the form of an egg, traveling through a tiny tube, within a dense cavity of flesh and blood.

Melodrama was expansive, Solar Power was hazy, Virgin is claustrophobic. It sounds like waking up at 4am, dry-mouthed, in a stranger's room; it sounds like waiting for the subway at West 4th Street when it's 90 degrees outside; it sounds like going to the gynecologist hungover. A proper New York City hoe phase, turned uncomfortably inside-out—this is messy, this is definitely something a bit different in 'pop music.' I think Lorde knows not everyone's going to take to it with the same ardor as her earlier work, and I respect her continued refusal to meet those impossible expectations.

Still, my favorite track is the one that feels the most open and expansive. "If She Could See Me Now" has the feeling of a throwback R&B summer jam, and not just because it borrows a phrase from Baby Bash's sublime 2003 single "Sugar Sugar." I don't think I've ever heard her use the particular style of vocal harmony she lays on that "Oh, god" in the chorus before? Pure pleasure and indulgence, at the tail end of an album of discomfort. She's taking a victory lap, a bit vengeful but also fairly relaxed, enjoying herself whilst getting swole. This is the opposite of down bad crying at the gym—she's lifting her ex lover's body weight, turning restrictive behavior into something constructive.

"As for me, I'm going back to the clay," she sings. It's Lorde's right to keep changing. Her renovation resists easy memes—having a Virgin summer is not something anyone's going to scream about online, but it might be something they do on their own, behind closed doors. I keep saying that privacy is the last luxury. Lorde knows that too, and she turned herself inside out anyway, for our entertainment and inspiration.

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