Lorde sheds her skin to reveal the woman behind the pop star

Under the cold blue glow of an X-ray machine, Lorde reveals her own pelvis, her IUD faintly visible like a secret hidden in plain sight. 

This is the cover of Virgin, Lorde’s fourth album, and it’s the perfect emblem for what happens in the next 40 minutes. Because while the music still carries Lorde’s trademark cool, the voice guiding us through these songs belongs more fully than ever to Ella Yelich-O’Connor, the woman behind the pop star.

Virgin is a record obsessed with the body and the chaos living inside it. It’s an album about hunger and desire, gender shifting like tectonic plates and generational ghosts rattling through the blood. It feels like the first time Lorde has let the audience press close enough to see the mess under her skin. “I might have been born again, I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” she admits on the swirling opener “Hammer,” a track that rattles like loose change in a subway tunnel. She sings this with a voice that can’t quite decide whether it’s exhausted or ecstatic.

Throughout Virgin, Lorde refuses to let her persona stand untouched. The album title itself has nothing to do with sexual inexperience. Instead, it’s about exposing the tender interior that she’s been afraid to look at. The virgin territory here is her own deepest truth and self-discovery. 

Nowhere is that clearer than on “Broken Glass,” a song that makes no attempt to romanticize her battles with disordered eating. “Mystique is dead, last year was bad,” she confesses. “I wanna punch the mirror to make her see that this won’t last.” There’s no metaphor to soften it. She’s admitting the love-hate dance she does with her own reflection. The track hits with a sleek, dancefloor sheen, which only makes the subject matter more gutting. Three years ago, Lorde spent the Melodrama era treating pain as a spectacle; now, she stares it straight in the face.

Sexual agency is woven through the album, especially on “Current Affairs.” Over a stuttering beat, Lorde sings, “He spit in my mouth like he’s saying a prayer.” It’s a line that might have been delivered with swagger on Melodrama, but here it lands as a confession, a sign of how she’s exploring not just pleasure but the vulnerability that comes with giving up control. Later, she’s crying on the phone, insisting nothing’s wrong, caught between her desires and the echoes of her mother’s warnings. It’s one of the sharpest illustrations of how Lorde sings about sex as both freedom and peril.

Generational trauma haunts this record like a shadow. “Favourite Daughter” ties Lorde’s career directly to her mother’s dreams and the artist’s people-pleasing tendencies. “Cause I’m an actress, all of the medals I won for ya, panic attack just to be your favourite daughter,” she sings, stuck between resentment and love. The song builds on a clapping beat that keeps rising higher, as if trying to break through some invisible ceiling. After all, if you’re not dancing through your breakdowns, what are you doing? In the second verse, she remembers her mother’s brother who died of a broken heart. This isn’t just pop songwriting; it’s a daughter digging through the rubble of family history, hoping to find herself intact.

Gender fluidity swirls and blurs through “Hammer,” where Lorde declares, “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.” It’s a blunt, almost casual revelation dropped in the middle of a verse about piercings and auras. On “Man of the Year,” she binds her chest, rides city streets on her bike, and sings of rebirth. The production stays sparse and skeletal, leaving the weight of revelation on her voice alone.

At times, though, minimalism feels like a missed opportunity. There’s so much space in these songs, and sometimes it feels less like artistic restraint and more like unfinished construction. The music occasionally underserves the intensity of Lorde’s lyrics. Yet the flipside is that there’s a thrilling intimacy to how exposed she sounds. That simplicity becomes the point.

Lorde’s voice remains her sharpest weapon. On “Clearblue,” she sings of pregnancy tests and bloodlines passed from mother to daughter, riding a lover until she cries, her vocals layered, feeling ancient and modern at once.

By the time Virgin reaches “David,” she’s singing, “I don’t belong to anyone.” It’s a line that lands like both a goodbye and a beginning. Virgin is Lorde’s clean slate, a rebirth and a record that doesn’t pretend to be pure, but keeps it real. 

And if the sound sometimes leaves space empty, it’s only because she’s still deciding what kind of person will fill it next. This is a new Lorde, and by hearing her sing, we get to see a glimpse of her.