Has the internet sucked all the fun out of the physical world, or has it merely concentrated it in Washington Square Park? New York University’s de facto campus green has long served as an open-air salon for bohemians and drug dealers, but since the coronavirus pandemic, it’s buzzed with new energy—the energy of content creation. TikTokers patrol the park’s paths, ambushing passersby to ask for interviews. Video-game streamers lead fans around “like a Pied Piper.” Timothée Chalamet went there to check out his own look-alike competition. The veil between the online and offline realms feels thin as Zoomers socialize in their Zoomer way: playful, anarchic, yet always aware of the camera.
Lorde is there too. The 28-year-old pop eccentric claims to have been hanging out in Washington Square Park “every day” of late. In April, she caused a commotion there by blasting her new single to a crowd of fans while filming a guerrilla-style music video. Her propulsive fourth album, Virgin, is set amid the heat-radiating pavement of the park and its downtown-Manhattan surroundings. The exemplary voice for a generation beset by digitally induced isolation, Lorde is making a bold effort to celebrate the visceral by singing of flesh, spit, sweat, blood, and cigarette smoke. But the rush she wants to deliver is diluted by another modern problem: self-consciousness verging on self-obsession.
Lorde changed the world when she was just a 16-year-old New Zealander uploading music to SoundCloud. Her 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, used hissed confessions, minimalistic beats, and a writerly sense of narrative to refute its era’s abundance of body-over-brain EDM and hip-hop. Many of her listeners were kids in the very same situation that Lorde sang about: stuck in a bedroom in their anonymous town, alienated from the high life advertised on their screens. The influence of that album—and its smoldering 2017 follow-up, Melodrama—still shapes the work of Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and even Taylor Swift. The point of post-Lorde pop isn’t to get faceless crowds grooving mindlessly. It’s to make each individual fan feel like their life is a movie.
Lorde then disoriented her audience with 2021’s Solar Power, a warm sigh of an album from a star enjoying some well-deserved relaxation. Its strummy songs about fleeing Hollywood to get high on a New Zealand beach contained some of the most beautiful craftsmanship of her career. But fans who’d always related to her started to feel left out of the story she was telling: Lorde was slowing down and leaning out at a time of life, her early 20s, when people tend to speed up and lean in. For many listeners, traits that had been essential to her art all along—overwroughtness, sentimentality, affectation—stopped seeming so cute.
Virgin is, as its name suggests, a purposeful regression, a return to youthful possibility. The sound is electronic and rhythmically driven; the singing trembles with desire and confusion. But Virgin also reflects where Lorde finds herself in her late 20s, and where pop finds itself in the mid-2020s. Following the example of Charli XCX’s Brat and its avant-garde influences, the producer Jim-E Stack has fashioned fun beats out of distorted noise. Lorde sings about a transitional period of womanhood marked by pregnancy tests, gender-identity explorations, body-image issues, crises of confidence, and a shattering breakup with her partner of seven years.
The action is as spiritual as it is physical: “I might have been born again,” she sings on the opener. The ensuing songs are laden with so many religious references that one wonders if she’s joined an unconventional church in which singing about kinky sex and party drugs is a sacrament. More likely, Lorde is just trying to lend enchantment to her 21st-century yuppie routine. The titanium water bottle she carries around is, she’s said in interviews, a “talisman.” Her smartphone is, per one lyric, “liquid crystal.” As she pumps iron and meditates on heartbreak, she seems to imagine her younger self looking down like an “angel.” She confesses to having treated her ex like God—but now, it’s clear, Lorde’s lord is Lorde.
The album’s best moments transmit the magic she’s singing about. The bleary garage beat of “Shapeshifter” creates a sense of twilight intrigue building to dawn-breaking revelation. On “If She Could See Me Now,” rigid-feeling verses melt satisfyingly into swaying choruses. When Lorde’s voice merges with waves of reverb on the gut-punch closer, “David,” you might check to see if the music is coming from outside, not inside, your headphones. Throughout, she uses conversational cadences to steer through hairpin emotional turns without making anyone dizzy.
Too often, though, Virgin’s thrill is muddled or muted. In part, blame Stack’s production: The trappings of sonic radicalism and aggression—industrial guitars that hum like broken TVs, percussion that pounds from all directions—belie what’s essentially smooth, streamable fare. Now-tired 2010 fads that Lorde pioneered, including bittersweet tropical-pop textures and moaning vocal snippets, are everywhere. Moments of genuine surprise and extremity are rare. An album that presents itself as stark and liberated feels too much like a product of creative compromise.
Against this backdrop, Lorde’s insularity starts to wear on the listener. This album about exciting city life is really about Lorde finding herself wherever she goes—in the aura reader on Canal Street, in the shirt her hookup is wearing, in the endorphin epiphany she has at the gym. She sings of ego death and punching mirrors, but only as part of a process of ever-more-granular inward inspection that’s intense but ultimately circular. Whatever’s happening in the broader world is written off as “painted faces” babbling about “current affairs.” As the album cover indicates, Virgin is an X-ray that highlights what’s not there.
So much of recent pop music is like this—hyperspecifically self-involved—precisely because of Lorde’s influence. But Virgin suggests this once-exciting approach is starting to become redundant and rote, reflecting a culture in which introspection has supplanted any sense of common purpose, and no one can tell the difference between living life and performing it. In Lorde’s early days, she sang a lot about “we,” a generational cohort beating back alienation together. Virgin is all “I”—but a breakthrough awaits when she or one of her talented contemporaries turns their lens outward.
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