Review

There’s a moment, roughly two tracks into *Virgin*, where you realise Ella Yelich-O’Connor isn’t simply rehashing the ghost of *Melodrama* nor recapturing the sun-drenched haze of *Solar Power*. Instead, Lorde has birthed something altogether more austere, more intimate — and more unsettling. *Virgin*, her fourth studio album, is a masterclass in restraint. The New Zealander trades maximalist pop structures for brittle, skeletal arrangements, often hanging entire verses on a single, trembling synth line or a bare piano chord. It’s not so much stripped back as it is exposed — veins, nerves, raw tendon. Thematically, the album feels like a reckoning. Not with fame — Lorde’s long since stepped off that carousel — but with femininity, desire, and the gnarled contradictions of modern virtue. On the standout track “Corpus,” she murmurs, “They only want the blood / never the bruise,” with the kind of elegant venom that recalls Kate Bush at her most witchy. There are moments of unexpected levity too — the spoken-word interlude “Daphne” flirts with absurdism, as Lorde reads a passage from Ovid over warped harp strings and the sound of running water. It’s baffling and brilliant. Vocally, she’s never sounded more present. Where once she cloaked herself in reverb and echo, here she lets the microphone catch every crack, every whispered vowel. It’s confrontational in its closeness, as though she’s whispering secrets you’re not quite sure you want to know. Is it commercial? Not in the slightest. Will it divide fans? Inevitably. But *Virgin* is Lorde at her most uncompromising — a fever dream of an album that dares to leave wounds unbandaged and questions unanswered. Not so much a return, then, as a ritual.

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