"Physically gratifying": Lorde picks apart her most exposing album, Virgin

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

Lorde is laying it all bare under the stark light with her fourth album Virgin ; a concept evident from the drop when she revealed artwork belonging to this new project. What is a more revealing and equalising image than an x-ray?
While our minds immediately link the album title to the obvious idea — sex and the transition to adulthood — Lorde explores "virgin" in a more literal sense; pure, unadulterated and original. No hiding, no mask, no covering up. Just a woman laid bare, allowing us to inspect her bones.
The album developed at a time when Lorde was experiencing a sense of renewed pureness herself. She came off her birth control and experienced a break-up in close succession, a seismic emotional and hormonal shift that allowed her to see herself with fresh eyes under a harsh, bright light — something she wasn't ready to do with Solar Power .
Inspired by the plain and frank writing of other women she had been reading, Lorde turned the spotlight inward to examine herself at a pore-level.
"I think coming out of my last album, which was a little bit more cloaked in metaphor and sort of imagery, which I really needed at that time, I think a lot of us did in the pandemic sort of need to go somewhere," she said.
"It wasn't the right time for the fluorescent lights to be on, to see the body in its grotesque beauty."
"But I think it's a combination of things. I think like coming into my later twenties, I felt more sort of accepting of myself and really tapped into the magnificence of being like in the body."
Inspecting and accepting this grotesque beauty she hadn't allowed herself to do publicly also allowed Lorde to honour parts of her teen self; one that was in the spotlight from the age of 16.
"When I think about being a teenager I think of a crudeness, a sort of lack of refinement," she said.
"I think of these big swings of emotion, these big surges and I think of this sort of toughness and stubbornness, and like 'my way'-ness. And also this deep vulnerability.
"You know, you're on the precipice of great change. You're leaving something behind. You're gaining something else. Just as I kind of came into myself and my body in this new way."
"Coming into my later 20s, I felt more accepting of myself and really tapped into the magnificence of being like in the body." ( Credit: Instagram / @lorde )
Being in a stripped back form of her reality without synthetic hormones or another to focus attention on, Lorde was also able to explore her gender expression and ways it felt affirming to her. The creation of 'Man Of The Year' lets us meet Lorde at the moment this kicked off for her — at an event celebrating the masculine where she felt "a wrongness" for dressing feminine.
"I wore this very basic hot girl outfit. My hair really looked like a girl and I felt all wrong, all night," she said.
"I was like, 'This is wrong. Why am I dressed like a girl tonight? This is a night where I'm a man, like I'm supposed to be with them'.
"This was at a time where I was kind of beginning to understand that my gender was, yeah, like more expansive than I had thought. I am like a woman, but there's masculinity within that. Deep masculinity."
Lorde's exploration of her gender involved her taking up more space by going to the gym, building muscle and broadening out.
"I was getting stronger, I'd gained some weight and all of a sudden I was seeing these shoulders and arms and I would see myself sometimes and get a fright," she said.
"I think a lot of women have this sort of conditioning to want to look. You know, to be the like smallest possible version of themselves. It took me a second to be like, 'what if we didn't do that?'"
The duality of 'Man Of The Year' follows immediately afterwards — 'Grown Woman'.
With its direct lyrics and unflinching horniness, Lorde delivers a track that can only be described in one way.
"It's my fuck-girl song," she laughed.
"It's what I want. It's kind of dumb and horny. It's so bombastic, the drum language."
"I am like a woman, but there's masculinity within that. Deep masculinity." ( Credit: Instagram / @lorde, Talia Chetrit )
Virgin was created with Jim-E Stack, combining her stirring lyricism with his abrasive industrial sound. It was an interesting learning curve for Lorde; Jim-E's process challenged her with the way she builds sounds and melodies, pulling her away from the well-worn creative path she's always tread.
"Jim-E has such a language to how he samples drums," she said.
"You hear the presence of machines in a big way with his drums, but I think that we really like took his language and expanded upon it and... I think the crux of our collaboration is that I am always sort of advocating for simplicity.
"I remember making 'Man of the Year', I was just like lying on the couch sort of singing into the microphone and then we like chopped that up together, like almost like an electronic song. Just pulling vocals around, throwing them wherever, putting this here, cutting that in half, moving it over there, and I hadn't written a melody like that before, but it felt right."
This collaboration resulted in Lorde and Jim-E "making choices that were physically gratifying" instead of thinking too deeply. With the use of Korg Polysix synths across Virgin , Lorde embraced the kind of warm, indulgent sounds she grew up listening to.
"It has this very yummy, I call it like 'guilty pleasure' feeling," she said.
"It reminds me of Ratatat, I grew up listening to so much Ratatat on the school bus. It was just so cool and satisfying, there's almost like a dumbness to the synth and I love that.
"It works on my body and kind of bypasses my brain, you know?"
"So I think the percussion choices were kind of made on a similar level. Just what feels good, not what do we think is a good idea."
Lorde surprised herself on Virgin , largely with her direct and unflinching lyricism. She wrote plainly about sex and the human experience in ways she'd never heard before, in a way she knew she needed to.
"I think there are lines in 'Current Affairs' and 'Clear Blue' that are pretty not safe for work, that felt kind of shocking to me and profound too," she said.
"I didn't realise that I had been wanting to hear a woman talk about sex the way I was talking about sex on this album.
"Honestly, this album is so many things. 'Broken Glass' – it took a lot to let that song out of me. 'Favourite Daughter'...there is stuff that's hard to say but I think I've got to say it."