Graham Reid | | 2 min read
Shapeshifter
Anyone looking for this country's dark underbelly need only consider social media comments about Lorde's new album. Some are vile, many simply stupid (“she's a wacko”), others shameful and a few telling: “I would rather listen to my 60's music.”
From the tenor of many, a significant number of women among them, in the absence of former PM Jacinda Ardern, Lorde – a talented, articulate 28-year old, this country's most successful musical export who played an energetic set at Britain's Glastonbury last week – is now the bile spewers' new target.
“An ode to Dear Leader JabCinders for her contribution to the destruction of a nation,” wrote one of the disaffected about this album, not actually available at that time.
Counter to this are academic critiques forensically disassembling Lorde's lyrics, persona, feminism and interviews. Then there's that huge fanbase which grew up with Lorde, rejoicing in her successes, dancing with unabashed enjoyment when she performed.
If her previous album Solar Power (2021) was stoned solipsism mentioning discomfort with fame (something she'd grappled with on her 2013 debut Pure Heroine), Lorde's Virgin is a deeper and often uncomfortably therapeutic album about personal growth and change.
“Can't believe I've become someone else, someone more like myself” (on the dramatic Man of the Year); “I become her again, visions of teenage innocence. How did I shift shape like that? (on Shapeshifter which rides an electrobeat not out of place on a Shapeshifter album); “I was a singer, you were my fan when no one gave a damn” on the upbeat Favourite Daughter about her relationship with her mother, poet Sonja Yelich.
The abrasive and wounded David carries a brutal rebuke: “Was I just young blood to get on tape? . . . Pure heroine mistaken for a featherweight.”
With a provocative title and cover art of an X-ray of her pelvis through jeans with her IUD visible, Virgin is a statement of empowerment, if often joyless.
That cover, joked American talkshow host Stephen Colbert when interviewing her, “is the most revealing and least erotic photo I've ever seen”.
And that's some measure of Lorde's cachet: evasive as much as direct, especially about fame: “I hate to admit just how much I paid for it . . . It's tough to admit just how much I get from it” on the pulsing Broken Glass.
As Pitchfork's Walden Green observed, Virgin explores “thorny subject matter rarely discussed outside of a therapist’s office: generational trauma, pregnancy tests, dysmorphia, dysphoria, sexual dominance and submission”.
That's heavy freight in 35 minutes. But Virgin, with provocative new producers, carries all that, offering more breathless tension than euphoric, danceable release.
It is notable for extraordinary candour: the speak-sing Clearblue opens with reticence “after the ecstasy, testing for pregnancy” but delights in the sex: “My hips moving faster, I rode you until I cried”.
Addressing how she's feeling right now, as Lorde or the woman behind the celebrity, Virgin is intelligent, challenging, self-centred and crafted contemporary pop which rarely feels performative.
Hardly a target to pour baseless scorn on, especially given the courage of its creator.
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This review appeared in print and online editions of the Listener on Friday July 4. It is reproduced here with the permission of the editor
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