Lorde's Journey of Self-Discovery and Gender Exploration in New Album 'Virgin'

Lorde seems to have emerged into her final form. We first met the New Zealand sensation at the tender age of 16 when she exploded into the Zeitgeist with 'Royals'. From there, we've seen her explore her identity through each release like a different set of clothes in her wardrobe. She's been the dark pop girlie, the up-all-night club kid, and the barefoot free spirit.

Now, ahead of her fourth album, Virgin, she has once again emerged from the proverbial chrysalis. But instead of debuting a flashy new look, she's stripped everything back — clean, vulnerable, exposed, virginal.

\"I was really trying to make an album that didn't lie in the instrumentation, in the language, in the feeling,\" Lorde told triple j Mornings' Lucy Smith. \"I've made work in the past that were sort of dramatising it as the point and pumping up the saturation on the colours and that's so sick. But I really felt with this one that there was something very… plain and true that needed to come, something pure.\"

Lorde's Virgin covers themes of womanhood, intimacy and gender fluidity. Lorde's taking it back to her roots in every sense of the word. She's physically returned to a version of herself she hasn't experienced for more than a decade. She's lyrically displayed her thoughts and feelings without a mask. And she's spiritually reached back into the line of women that came before her, who made her who she is today.

There's an abruptness to Virgin, where Lorde lays it all out on the table for the world to see. Launching this new era with an X-ray of herself was merely the beginning of this up-front energy, which she credits to wanting to honour her teenage self.

\"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 sort of big surges, and I think of this toughness and 'my way'-ness. And also, this deep vulnerability. You're on the precipice of great change. You're leaving something behind, you're gaining something else. Just as I came into myself and my body in this new way.\"

Lorde's newness of herself comes down to the personal decision of stopping birth control; the IUD we see in the X-ray scan. Right as the 28-year-old teeters on another of life's precipices — her Saturn return — she made the decision to change herself at a cellular level, allowing her body to revert to its rawest form. And with that change come significant shifts in hormones, her understanding of herself, her identity. It's this exact renewal that she opens Virgin with, singing on the first track, 'Hammer'.

\"There's a heat in the pavement, my mercury's raising Don't know if it's love or if it's ovulation When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail\"

\"For me, ovulating for the first time in 10 years kind of felt like how that opening synth sounds,\" she said. \"Very raw. Something very kind of pure and crazy pumping through your system. There was also something kind of macho in a way, just the strength, the physical strength in my body was completely different. I lift weights, and it was crazy when I would ovulate — it's sort of more chill now — but when I was first coming off birth control, I would be able to lift significantly more.\"

Writing in such an up-front manner is a big shift for Lorde, considering 2021's Solar Power was \"cloaked in metaphor and imagery\", as she told Smith, and the ecstasy-soaked energy of her much-loved 2017 release, Melodrama.

Lorde's Solar Power is a mellow detour from an artist that once defined a decade. Inspired by Mother Nature and willingly out-of-touch with pop trends, Lorde's third album won't define an era. But that's the point. On Virgin, she was determined to turn the harsh fluorescent lights on to pick herself apart wholly.

Inspired by reading the works of plain-writing women (in a 2023 newsletter, she noted reading Sheila Heti, Renata Adler, Olga Tokarczuk and Molly Giles), Lorde wanted to be as courageous as these women are with their words. No sugar-coating, no crypticism, just seeing \"the body in its grotesque beauty\".

One artist Lorde drew inspiration from while creating Virgin was British artist Tracey Emin, specifically her 1995 work, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 — 1995 (which was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004). This piece was the background on Lorde's laptop while she built the album — its influence perhaps most evident on third track 'Shapeshifter' — as a reminder of the kind of unflinching art she wanted to create.

The overarching theme of Virgin is Lorde's deep exploration of her gender and femininity. In the process of stripping herself back, Lorde discovered: \"I was beginning to understand that my gender was more expansive than I had thought.\" In the album's second single, 'Man Of The Year', we meet Lorde at this realisation point, sparked by feeling out of place at the GQ Man Of The Year awards.

\"I wore this basic hot-girl outfit, my hair really looked like a girl, and I felt all wrong all night,\" she told Smith. \"This is a night where I'm a man, like I'm supposed to be with them. I really felt this wrongness. I'm a woman, but there's masculinity within that. Deep masculinity.\"

Written at a time when she was going to the gym, gaining strength, and broadening out in her arms and shoulders, Lorde challenges both her and our understanding of modern femininity with Virgin. While she credits her mother and grandmother as being \"the blueprint\" for her, she also pushes the envelope to explore what it means to be an unafraid, unapologetic woman in 2025.

\"I think a lot of women have this conditioning to want to look… to want to be the smallest possible version of themselves,\" she said. \"It took me a second to be like, 'What if we didn't do that? What would surrendering to becoming whatever size you're supposed to become do to your life? What would that feel like, if you could be brave and let that happen?'\"

\"It's very cute\" Lorde reflects on her breakthrough hit 'Royals'. \"The answer is that amazing stuff happens. I couldn't be more of an advocate of letting yourself become yourself, all the way, come what may. You truly have to surrender to it. You don't know what that's gonna look like, but it's gonna be good.\"

As Lorde reflects on her maternal lineage, she's also forging ahead with her own divine feminine — one who's confident to reveal her whole self. Unadulterated, unfiltered, unflinching. \"My mum's such an incredible woman,\" she said. \"She really is like the blueprint for who I am. And her pain is my pain, and her peace is my peace and her grandmother's and all this. So I really had that sense of us all being together.\"

Virgin is out now. Hear Lucy Smith hosting Mornings on triple j from 9am Monday to Friday.