Lorde's Virgin encourages us to get dirty and be ourselves
Let's hear it for the (wo)man of the year
A note from Lavender Sound editor-in-chief Max Freedman:
Welcome back to Lavender Sound’s end-of-year 2025 coverage! Although I previously regretted not having reviewed Lorde’s ‘Virgin’ upon its release — it’s among my favorite LPs of 2025 — it was clearly meant to be: Tawny Lara of Beyond Liquid Courage has provided some highly insightful perspectives below. Enjoy!
ALBUM RATING: ABSOLUTE MUST-LISTEN
Lorde loves drugs in a creative, Huxleyan, Doors of Perception kind of way. Her albums are infamously identified by the drugs she used while creating them: Pure Heroine was booze. Melodrama was MDMA. Solar Power was weed. Virgin is MDMA, again, but in a therapeutic setting. This artistic approach to drugs fascinates me because substance use, like art, isn’t always black and white.
Virgin, Lorde’s fourth studio album, explores heavy themes like gender, birth control, being a public figure, and eating disorders. The weighty subject matter contrasts the music, a spacious and minimalist yet still hard-hitting spin on her signature electropop sound.
With co-production from Jim-E Stack, who also co-produced this year’s Bon Iver album, Virgin sounds as wintry as the blue-white aura of the album’s cover. (It’s her first album since her 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, not to feature Jack Antonoff as co-producer.)
Max again! Read more about the aforementioned Bon Iver album, ‘SABLE, fABLE,’ below courtesy of Alex Lewis, a friend of Lavender Sound:
In a Stephen Colbert interview, Lorde discussed Virgin’s artwork — an X-ray of her pelvis — and pointed out her jeans’ zipper, belt buckle, and IUD. “This is the most revealing and least erotic photo I’ve ever seen,” Colbert joked.
That summarizes Virgin’s vibe. Yes, Lorde is a global pop star. But her Virgin era was not curated with the male gaze in mind. It makes sense for an album that explores such personal subject matter to have one of the most intimate images imaginable on the cover.
In “Hammer,” she sings, “I burn and I sing and I scheme and I dance / Some days, I’m a woman, some days, I’m a man.” This line prompted fans to question Lorde’s gender identity. Is she non-binary?, we all wondered. Nope! She loves being a woman who embraces both her feminine and masculine sides. She identifies as a strong, masculine woman, as she said on her Fashion Neurosis appearance.
The music video for “Man of the Year” presents a visual representation of her gender expression, starting with a close-up shot of her makeup-free face, reminding my geriatric millennial brain of Alanis Morissette’s 1995 classic video for “Head Over Feet.”
Lorde’s camera slowly pans out to a pale, white room, where she slouches barefoot in a chair dressed like an All-American dude in loose-fitted jeans and a white tee. Later, she removes the tee, taping down her breasts with silver masking tape. She then slithers over to the other side of the room; the audience sees a floor full of strategically placed dirt.
This stark minimalism reminded me of my visit to Dia, a modern art museum in Beacon, New York. The main difference is that Dia’s barely-there exhibits left me feeling confused about whether this could be art, while “Man of the Year” is performance-art gold.
Lorde approaches the piles of dirt while tying her dark brown locs into a loose ponytail, showing us that she’s about to do something serious that requires no hair in the face. Her toes and baggy jeans dig into the gritty earth. She writhes and dives and screams, digging her nails, allowing herself to get filthy in an “unladylike” way, celebrating the Man of the Year: herself.
One of my favorite things about Lorde is that she’s an artist first, then a pop star. She’s known for her visceral, somatic dance moves, similar to Este Haim’s “bass face.” These women care more about performing authentically than looking hot, which ironically makes them hotter.
But alas, Lorde is still a woman in a world where society expects us to look a certain way according to trending beauty standards. In “Broken Glass,” she debates whether something is worth “rotting teeth” over, alluding to the enamel breakdown that’s a common side effect of bulimia.
This track is reminiscent of Tove Lo’s 2022 “Grapefruit.” Both artists found ways to sing earnestly about those dark, lonely moments hovering over a toilet while the dizzying images of perfection spin around your head, promising yourself you’ll never do “it” again.
Perhaps these societal expectations are one of the many things Lorde yearns to escape. In “Shapeshifter,” she sings about the complexities of being a woman in the public eye. “I’ve been the siren, been the saint / I’ve been the fruit that leaves a stain / I’ve been up on a pedestal / But tonight I just wanna fall.”
One doesn’t need to be a celebrity to relate to the desire to be yourself while people have certain expectations of what you should be. I often use the word “shapeshift” to describe toggling between my professional life and personal life; my eagerness to find a middle ground echoes Lorde’s desire to “just wanna fall.”
This isn’t the first time she’s explored being in the public eye. Perhaps she’s still Little Ella, whose 2021 song “The Path” cheekily addresses the plight of being a “teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash.”
Now, she appears to have found a healthy relationship with the camera flash, as evidenced by the viral finale of her 2025 Ultrasound Tour. She ends the show performing Virgin’s final track, “David,” while walking through the crowd wearing a jacket that quite literally amplifies camera flashes. Perhaps wearing the nightmare gives her the power that she no longer needs to shapeshift away from.
A modern pop star knows how to “sneak in the vegetables,” meaning they can inject heavy subject matter into TikTok-able earworms. You can move your body to “Broken Glass” without realizing it’s a song about body dysmorphia. You can listen to “Man of the Year” while contemplating who you consider Man of the Year.
Virgin is a great album because Lorde brought all her past selves into the writing room. She expands with each album and perhaps each substance. She questions herself and the world around her, transcribing her thoughts into poetic lyrics that reflect her introspection. In the process, she inspires her listeners to look deeper into their complexities, too.
Thanks for reading Lavender Sound. We urge you to take a second to read about the fact that Israel continues to bomb Gaza after the ceasefire, and that the United Nations has said the state of Israel is committing genocide yet has greenlit a “peacekeeping” plan that further disenfranchises the Palestinian people.
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Thanks for letting me shapeshift with y'all :)