“What Was That,” the lead single on Lorde’s fourth album, “Virgin,” found one of the most thoughtful and interrogative pop stars of the last decade futzing around with aftermarket Charli XCX-isms in an up-tempo thumper that indicated that, after years of reluctant anti-hits and even more reluctant hits, she finally might be caving in to eagerness.
Thankfully, it’s followed by “Shapeshifter,” the album’s best song, which is far stranger, and far more successful. Over a brittle, skittish post-drum-and-bass beat, Lorde sings about sexual hunger, and what parts of yourself you have to release to embrace it. But in the chorus, the song morphs into a metaphor about fame and untouchability, and how unfulfilling those things ultimately are. “I’ve been up on the pedestal,” she sings icily, smearing out the words. “But tonight I just wanna fall.”
Were this the through line of “Virgin,” it would make for a fascinating album. A dozen years after “Royals” turned Lorde from a New Zealand bedroom prodigy into a prophet, she’s angling for something of a restart. Sloughing away her celebrity and her preciousness is a bold choice. But “Virgin” is a far emptier album than that hefty premise would imply. It is neither lean-in gratuitous hitmaking, nor philosophical treatise on the lameness of success.
It is, in the main, an album of fits and starts, notions that don’t pan out — her most piecemeal work to date. “Man of the Year” begins with a slow plucked guitar and Lorde singing about ego death, and then limply lingers. The singing on “Clearblue,” about unprotected sex, is so heavily digitized and filtered that it lacks any emotional oomph. “GRWM” revisits the theme of erotic liberty — “Soap, washing him off my chest / Keeping it light, not overthinking it” is her opener — but the lyrics about searching for oneself are at odds with the production, which feels like it’s drowning her. Jim-E Stack is a co-producer (with Lorde) on every track; together they’ve chosen erratic eccentricity, with moods that shift so suddenly there’s little to grab onto.
Lorde sings conspiratorially, but often on this album, when you listen closely, there’s no secret wisdom being conveyed. The discussion of sexual awakening is promising, but it’s not explored at much depth. And throughout the album, and also its marketing, there’s muddled messaging about gender identity that scans as surface level.
Perhaps Lorde is simply a victim of the tyranny of high expectations. For a decade now, she has stood for resistance within the machine — the machine she’d never quite chosen to be a part of, yet which accepted her anyway.
But for that same decade, she’s been announcing, directly or less so, that she’d prefer something else. This has been the intent, overt or otherwise, of every album since her debut — with her second album, “Melodrama,” it was a winning exploration of avant-pop. With her third, “Solar Power,” it was with a retreat to earthenness.
The scheme has worked, in a way — no song since her debut album has cracked the Top 10 of the Hot 100.
And yet — willingly or unwillingly, it’s not clear — Lorde remains a superstar. In part, that’s because of the intensity of the promise she’s shown, and the thirst for a wise pop counternarrative. The gravity she displayed on her debut was seismic; no one has successfully recreated it since.
That includes her. There are flickers of something more promising here, though. And intriguingly, it’s also indebted to Charli XCX. Last year, Lorde appeared on a remix of Charli’s “Girl, So Confusing.” On the surface, the song represented two sorts of pop iconoclasts overcoming their personal chilliness to create something electric. But Lorde’s verse, which tackled her health and body issues, was revealing and vividly sorrowful.
She revisits that topic on “Broken Glass,” the other standout song from “Virgin.” Like “Shapeshifter,” it has a sharp, corroded beat. And Lorde takes it as a prompt to talk about how she’d been treating her own body like a machine, cutting weight at all costs: “Felt great to strip / New waist-to-hip.”
She sounds mechanical, and also sad and also feverish — as if she’d just been jolted out of a haze. For the first time on this album, misery and self-doubt are delivered with urgency, and Lorde once again sounds like the skeptic of a decade ago, except this time she’s her own target. It is, alas, a hit.
Lorde
“Virgin”
(Republic)
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
The post Is Lorde Finally Done With the Spotlight? appeared first on New York Times.
