Some industrious fan should organize the Lorde walking tour of New York—people would pay money to see where contemporary pop’s most famous mystic has deposited trails of her magic dust. Start at the Flame Diner near Columbus Circle, where she worked late into the night writing lyrics for 2017’s Melodrama; cut across the park to the Met, where she once stole that fork as a souvenir for her mom. Swing down to Canal Street where, as she tells us in the opening moments of her fourth album, Virgin, she’s getting her ears pierced and her aura read. Then across the Williamsburg Bridge to end the night dancing at Baby’s All Right.
For her last album, 2021’s Solar Power, Lorde took an extended beachside sabbatical, channeling her retreat into psychedelic, somewhat stifled acoustic pop that felt out of place and time. Afterward, four years ago now, she plugged back in and bought an apartment in Manhattan. She befriended artists and read a lot of books; she went through a breakup, came to terms with an eating disorder, and began to inhabit a more fluid understanding of her gender.
This broad set of circumstances—moving to and finding oneself in the city—has precipitated so much art that it almost feels too obvious to bother pointing out. But some make the familiar story revelatory. I think of Nan Goldin, whose Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a vital record of queer downtown New York in the 1980s. Her photos—flash-lit, unsentimental images of tangled lovers and friends—are lodged in my head as I listen to Virgin, Lorde’s gritty, tender, and often transcendent ode to freedom and transformation.
Maybe Lorde agrees with the masses that Solar Power never hit quite the same as Melodrama. Maybe that’s why Virgin circles back to the body-friendly, programmed drums and synthetic sparks she left in 2017, with a lead single so analogous to Melodrama’s that she could have just called it “Blue Light.” Former right-hand man Jack Antonoff is absent—Lorde’s primary creative partner here is Jim-E Stack, who has worked with Bon Iver and Caroline Polachek, with additional contributions from pop producer du jour Dan Nigro. The new collaborators settle into familiar rhythms. Like Melodrama, Virgin touches off from heartbreak and swims gracefully through its aftermath. Its title is unrelated to sexual purity—if anything, Lorde’s references to sex here are exceptionally frank. Rather, it signals a state of innocence and exploration, of hunger for experience, that seems to have pulled Lorde back to an earlier version of herself.