Autopsy of a youth spent within an industry: The complex career retrospection of Lorde’s ‘Virgin’
There’s a lot at play on Lorde’s latest album, as there always is.
With each new record, the singer seems to introspect on a distinct period. When her debut album Pure Heroine came out, she was only 16, sharing a collection of songs distinctly about teenhood. On her follow-up, Melodrama, the 20-year-old considered first relationships. On Solar Power, the young adult grappled with a desire for something different. But now, at 28, her latest effort, Virgin, seems to deal with earlier life.
In particular, it appears to grapple with the fact that everything that has come before in her life has been recorded. Researching Lorde’s age on her breakout record for the introduction of this article really hammers home the message. I knew Lorde was young when she emerged, but 16 is basically still a baby. And that was when the album actually came out. It means that she was even younger when writing tracks like ‘Ribs’ or ‘Buzzcut Season’. When she was forging the bold, creative decisions that launched her career and instantly made her a star to note, she wasn’t even legally an adult.
I remember that album well, and I remember that soon after, there was the immediate chorus of “what’s next?” That’s a question that plagues artists, but especially seems to plague women artists. They’re rarely given much time to sit and take it all in.
Before the summer of 2024 had even faded, people were eager to declare Brat Summer over. Wet Leg were dubbed as has-beens before they even had a chance to consider their second album. Lana Del Rey has struggled time and time again with people leaking her work, with fans always being too impatient to allow her music time. In Lorde’s case, there was little consideration for the fact that this teenager would need to do some living before she could write about life.
It’s not that she already had years and years of life to turn into art. For an artist that young, it meant that anything significant that happened to her was quickly put on tape and shared, and on Virgin, she seems to be considering the weirdness and potential damage of that.
Lorde sums that up pretty instantly on track one, ‘Hammer’, singing, “When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. It’s a perfect representation of how, when Lorde is holding a pen, everything looks like something for us to consume; her art is a hammer, her life is the nail, everything gets hit.
That’s true of Virgin to some extent; this is a deeply personal album once again, one in which the singer considers topics like personal relationships, such as her experience of sexuality and gender. But her considerations of her own career and role as a public figure sit next to all these things as an unshakable side question. On ‘Shapeshifter’, while the song is largely about her role in romantic relationships, there’s also an element of the artist always, to some degree, being an evolving figure in the eyes of the celebrity world, too, as she sings, “I’ve been up on the pedestal / But tonight I just wanna fall”.
The personal and the professional exist inseparably on the album as they do in Lorde’s life. On ‘Favourite Daughter’, her relationship with her mother, one of the closest connections a person could have, is interwoven with her career. Connecting the lines between the tenderness of her mum supporting her only career and the weirdness of her role in the lives of her fans now, she sings of facing the masses, “every night, the room fills up with / People who are convinced I’m not / Just some kid fakin’ it for your love”, as if her job is still just her attempt to impress her mother.
The very idea of the ‘Favourite Daughter’ becomes more than just personal. Singing about breaking her back in an attempt to win accolades and favours, it’s about the desire to be the industry’s favourite daughter too; it’s a bright new thing, the artists they love, the star they’ll support and hold onto.
But it hasn’t always worked out that way for Lorde. Also in this merge of personal and professional introspection, there is a darker, hazier line when the two connect. During her career, she has been romantically linked to a few figures. There are rumours about a possible connection between her and Jack Antonoff, her long-term collaborator who was notably absent from this era. Then there was Justin Warren, a man much older than her who was involved in signing her as a teenager, with whom she was romantically connected, too.
‘David’ appears to address both. “Was I just young blood to get on tape?” Lorde asks the figures that inspired this track, singing about a romantic tie that was also closely tethered to her art and career and wondering where the exploitation lay. With the song’s title being a reference to the parable of David and Goliath, a call back to her debut also draws this image of now looking back at herself, confused about these feelings of wanting to protect her smaller, younger self while also feeling utterly underestimated: “Pure heroine mistaken for featherweight”. In the end, she makes a decisive statement of cutting her art away from these figures, telling them, “And once I could sing again, I swore I’d never lеt / Let myself sing again for you”.
“If I’d had virginity, I would have given that too,” she sings, nodding to the album’s title but to all these thoughts at once. It’s the idea of giving absolutely everything, including something she doesn’t have to give, something that is often seen as the ultimate image of innocence.
It paints a picture of the devotion she has for her career but also the strange, complex feelings she now has towards that fact, and where the line of her personal privacy and boundaries may have been crossed during her youth spent in the public eye, sharing her inner world for all to see. Virgin deals explicitly with the particular oddness of Lorde’s developing celebrity.
