Our culture revolves around a lot of eventized 4-year moments: high school, the Olympics, leap years, presidential elections. As for me? My life revolves around a Lorde album every 4 years.
Let’s start with some context here: at this point, Lorde has been soundtracking my emotional state for more than half of my life. I bought The Love Club EP on iTunes! I was reblogging gifs from Pure Heroine music videos on my tumblr page in middle school! Melodrama has literally impacted me so much that I could write a dissertation on it at this point! I’m even a super fan of Solar Power and will defend it to the grave! (For those of you who don’t get it, you clearly have never been a 25-year-old stoner before.) All this to say…I am not new to this, I am true to this.
All of this precedence leads us to Virgin. My expectations for the album were high, as I’m going through personal changes in my life and could use a soundtrack for that reinvention. I recently moved apartments, and before the album came out I pictured myself listening to Virgin and walking around my new neighborhood like that one video of Carrie Bradshaw looking unequivocally fierce while walking in slow motion. Reinvention is a concept in which Lorde has said this album was born out of, and the product of that rebirth is, as the album cover aptly represents, an emotional x-ray of the person behind the pop star facade of Lorde. In doing so, she excavates generational trauma born out of gender socialization and deals with the repercussions of building intimacy with someone while you’re still figuring yourself out; the outcome is some of her best music to date. Behold the power of feeling your nonbinary oats!
Her meditations on sex and intimacy are staggering here, and more revealing of her sexual proclivities than we’ve seen before. As always, she somehow writes lyrics that feel as though they’ve been plucked from my brain like an arcade claw machine game; one of my favorite tracks, “Shapeshifter”, reflects on being a chameleon for people she’s been intimate with, and accurately represents the thoughts that go through my head when I scroll on Grindr. (Sorry if you’re reading this, mom and dad.) There is a specificity and delicacy to her lyrics about sex that hit me like a gut punch throughout the whirling 35-minute runtime; one of my favorites is “he spit in my mouth like he’s saying a prayer” on “Current Affairs”. In dropping us into a hyper-specific intimate moment like this, we as the listener come to understand the reverence with which she views sex, and how that in turn informs how she views herself. She has always been prolific when writing about love, so to hear her sing about the relationship between love and sex, all through the lens of her expanding gender identity (“Man of the Year”) and interfacing with the bioessentialism engrained in our culture (“Clearblue”), continues to blow me away on each listen.
When “What Was That” first dropped, I was so grateful for new Lorde music, but I was worried that the album would be full of songs rehashing her past music. Luckily, that song was a sonic red herring of sorts, and the rest of the album benefits from being relatively new musically. Virgin holds on to the minimalist production and anti-pop sounds that made Lorde famous in the first place without ever relying on the nostalgia to be successful. In the face of pop stars who rose to fame in the 2010s looking to recapture the musical magic that made them famous — both in good ways (see: “Abracadabra”) and bad (see: Katy Perry’s 143 and whatever’s going on with the latest MARINA album) — it’s so refreshing to see someone truly aiming for musical growth without losing the spark that made us love her in the first place. Virgin gives me hope that pop music in 2025 is not just “reheating nachos” or TikTok bait or 23-year-old amateur gymnasts who are trying to steal my look1. As Charli xcx predicted during her Coachella set, it will indeed be a Lorde Summer for me!
Other Recent Releases I’m Gagging Over
JADE — “Plastic Box”
If you’re not stanning JADE at this current moment, you are not paying attention. This girl is SAVING POP MUSIC!!!!! Jade was always my favorite member of Little Mix (I was a huge Mixer in my teenage years), so to see her shining so brightly in her solo endeavors is very pleasing to me indeed. When I tell you that every single one of her songs thus far have been amazing, I am not exaggerating — that being said, “Plastic Box”, the most recent single from her forthcoming debut album THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!, is far and away my favorite so far. I think it is chemically impossible to listen to this song and not feel joy. It’s giving Robyn-esque Europop perfection and I literally cannot stop listening. Strong contender for my Song of the Summer!
Jae Stephens — “Kiss It”
I’ve been reaalllllllly into Jae ever since I heard the brilliant single “Body Favors” last year. The entire EP that that song is on, SELLOUT, is fantastic, and every release she’s dropped since has been amazing. She opened for FLO on their tour this year (but not at the Brooklyn show that I went to, what is that about….) and I’m loving watching her continue to rise to fame by way of interacting with stan Twitter accounts. She’s teased an upcoming song that I fear will reset my DNA when it finally comes out, so I’m excited to see where she goes next.
Song of the Week
Madonna — “Deeper and Deeper”
Every week I find myself listening to a song that I’ll either come across randomly online, remember exists after a few years, or learn about for the first time, and I become infatuated with it for about a week. So I’ll be sharing those in this newsletter as well! I came across a tweet last week about Madonna’s Erotica, so I decided to revisit the album…and damn this food is so good. “Deeper and Deeper” has been the most on repeat because it feels the gayest on the album to me, and we did just wrap up Pride Month after all. When she references “Vogue” at the end? Girl, I gag every time. In case you need another reminder why Madonna is the pop blueprint, give this song a stream!
That’s all this week! If you’ve gotten all the way to this point, thank you for reading this inaugural post. Subscribe to this newsletter if you care about that sort of thing, follow me on Twitter or Instagram if you care about that sort of thing, and I’ll see you again next week for more gay debauchery. Ciao!
The mullet/mustache community is under ATTACK because of one Mr. Benson Boone. “People say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair” etc., etc.
mr kyle we're obsessed thank u for this
the way virgin hasn’t left my record player since it’s arrival… no 15 no lunch break just straight overtime