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.

Those experiences she’s after are intensely physical, though not as glamorous or easily aestheticized as you’d expect from a pop artist. Twenty seconds into opener “Hammer,” Lorde utters a word I’d wager has never been heard in the Hot 100—“ovulation”—and follows it up with “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man,” a striking, if uncharacteristically blunt, subversion of biological essentialism. On Virgin, her singing is visceral and sometimes—there’s no other word—orgasmic. Her relationship to her own body is complicated by her history of disordered eating, which she references freely across the album. But in her telling, living in a human body is also sublime (“The mist from the fountain is kissing my neck”) and cathartic (“I rode you until I cried”). And it’s abject: It’s cum on your chest and acid reflux from throwing up and peeing on a stick because you might be pregnant.

That last vignette comes from “Clearblue,” a spare swirl of vocoder melody à la Imogen Heap. It’s all Lorde’s voice, words running across her tongue like ribbons curling against a blade as she recounts a pregnancy scare that blurred the boundaries between intimacy and independence. The incident passes, becoming a precious reminder of her own vitality; the test a relic, lost to the trash. But the topic of motherhood remains potent. The presence of Lorde’s mom, the poet Sonja Yelich, is felt across the album—particularly on “Favourite Daughter,” a bubbly number where Lorde imagines her own career as the fulfillment of her mother’s ambitions. Lorde’s choice of album cover, too, is meaningful: Heji Shin, the photographer who X-rayed her pelvis, is perhaps best known for her raw images of crowning newborns. Documents of the grotesque and generative potential of the human body, they can also be read as metaphors for the bloody labor of creativity.

Now 28, Lorde can’t be neatly mapped on the continuum of girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. This is the consequence of being known as a perennial wunderkind, a sage since 16, and now also a sort of mother to her dozens of musical descendants. (She calls her fans her “kids,” too.) She gets at this state of multitude on “GRWM,” declaring herself “a grown woman in a baby tee”—an objectively dumb lyric that she’s just confident enough to pull off. The production here, as on much of the record, is minimal—a rattling beat and some synth stabs, adding muscle but not bulk and pushing Lorde’s voice and words to the foreground.

It’s long been her writing that telegraphs Lorde’s capital-A artistry. Where someone like Charli XCX is keen to move culture, and Addison Rae is keen to put on a good show, Lorde is happy to sweat it out in the Notes app. The music’s job, it seems here, is mostly to not get in her way. “Shapeshifter” is a high mark, a lovely bit of text painting that starts with a skeletal garage beat, shaded in gradually until it hits you with a full bleed of color. This song moves; it mirrors the state of constant flux that Lorde is singing about. Virgin could stand to have more of that synergy—production touches that are as freaky and unpredictable as the person at their center. Instead, there’s the glitchy vocal fragments and oddball samples that we’ve heard before. There’s so much negative space, it feels almost like a tease, because it implies everything that could fill it.

But that ecstatic sense of possibility—of being many things at once, of following your impulses in all directions, all the time—is the animating force of Virgin. Some would be cowed by the enormity of the prospect. Not Lorde: “I swim in waters that would drown so many other bitches,” she crows on “If She Could See Me Now.” It’s not hard to see why she’s drawn to another stop on the Lorde tour of New York: Walter De Maria’s Earth Room (1977), a Soho loft filled with nothing but 250 cubic yards of dirt. Lorde recreated it in her video for “Man of the Year,” where she binds her chest with duct tape and thrashes about in the soil, tapped into some elemental lifeforce. The original installation has been there for nearly 50 years; nothing grows. The whole thing is pregnant with possibility, blissfully abstract, ripe for interpretation. It feels like a portal to anywhere you want to go.