Virgin: A Synth Pop Confessional of Identity, Heartbreak, and Resurrection

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Genre: Pop/R&B Rating: 8.4 Label: Republic

On her fourth album, Lorde abandons sun-drenched escapism for a visceral deep-dive into identity, grief, and the emotional wreckage of fame.

Album Cover for Lorde's Virgin

After the polarizing reception of Solar Power, Lorde returns in full spectral color with Virgin, a record that feels like a rebirth and a reckoning. Unapologetically experimental and fiercely personal.  The singles that precede this album are proof of that. Virgin is a bold synth-pop odyssey into grief, gender, body politics, and the disorienting mess of fame and femininity. Produced with heavy hands-on synths and swelling instrumentals, Virgin leans into experimental pop without losing Lorde's innate sense of melody.

The first single of the album, What Was That, is an aching ballad, "‘it might not let me go" like a mantra to a ghost that refuses to leave, is delivered over layers of shimmering production that manages to sound both expansive and claustrophobic. In contrast, the last single from the album, Hammer, which is conceptually the opener, is sonically daring and thematically direct. It rumbles with industrial textures built around a lyric that defines the project’s fluidity:

“Some days I’m a woman and some days I’m a man”.

 It’s not just a gender expression- it’s emotional shapeshifting, tied into sex, power, and vulnerability. It sets the tone with the striking honesty and pulsating synth beat.

Clearblue quietly devastates, a song reminiscent of "Writer in the Dark" from her 2017 album, Melodrama. Dealing with pregnancy, its subdued production mirrors the emotional numbness and weight of the subject matter, with the song's name referencing the pregnancy test, underscoring its quiet, domestic horror.

Then there is Broken Glass throws salt into the wound even more with Broken Glass, a brutal takedown of body image and the violence of beauty culture,

“I let myself get. Sucked in by arithmetic. Felt great to strip. New waist to hip. I hate to admit. Just how much I paid for it”,

Lorde’s writing is at its most visceral and confessional in the searing takedown of body image and the violence of beauty culture.

Shapeshifter throws a curveball: rapid beats clash with Lorde's slow, deliberate vocal delivery,

"I’ve been the fire, I’ve been the flame. I’ve been the prize, the ball, the chain"

It's a track that evokes the tension between who she was and who she is trying to become. It shares similar emotional turbulence to some tracks off of her 2017 album, Melodrama. Meanwhile, tracks like Man of the Year, its time, swelling gradually into a tender ballad drenched in loss. The chorus lingers like fog.  Similarly, If She Could See Me Now captures the brittle grace of post-breakup reflection, with a muted piano line that blooms into shimmering electronics.

Current Affairs exposes the identity erosion that often comes with toxic relationships, cementing the album's recurring theme of reclaiming selfhood in the face of external chaos. Virgin is a record preoccupied with identity, not just how it’s formed, but how it shatters and reforms under pressure. Tracks like GRWM and David fuse bubbly synth-pop with existential self-interrogation:

“Maybe you'll finally know who you wanna be / A grown woman in a baby tee.” 

She touches on themes of family trauma on Favorite Daughter, which examines the inherited weight of fame and grief: “You had a brother / I look like him/you told us as kids / he died of a broken heart.” This track—coated in dreamy synths—folds personal history into myth-making with the subtlety of a novelist.

There’s a freedom in her messiness, a relief in her refusal to tie everything up in a pop-perfect bow. At its core, Virgin is about reckoning—gender, heartbreak, celebrity, and self-image crash together in a way that feels more like a diary than a statement. It’s a late-night album, one that rewards repeat listens with flashes of clarity and gut-punch vulnerability. Lorde isn’t chasing pop dominance anymore. She’s chasing something weirder, lonelier—and, somehow, more resonant.

Best Tracks:

“Shapeshifter,” “Man of the Year,” “If She Could See Me Now,” “Favorite Daughter,”

“Current Affairs,” “Clearblue”