Don’t Look Down

Grace Byron considers Lorde’s “Virgin” and the gauntlet we lay for our pop stars.

By Grace ByronJuly 14, 2025

• Music

• Gender & Sexuality

WE WANT our pop stars to be vulnerable about their failures. At the 2025 Grammys, Charli XCX said she thought people related to Brat so much because they could identify with her mess. She shows her work. Her ruminations and heartache, her jealousy and career issues. She also addressed her troubles with food—something she and her collaborator sing jointly about on “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde”:

’Cause for the last couple years
I’ve been at war with my body
I tried to starve myself thinner
And then I gained all the weight back

Pop stars feeling able to talk openly about their eating disorders seems like a good thing; in her self-produced documentary Miss Americana (2020), Taylor Swift detailed her own struggles while eating a burrito. But talking things out this way is not the same as leaning into intuitive eating. Recovery is tricky. Sometimes any version of talking about ED can be as triggering as scrolling thinspo posts. Vulnerability, like sympathy, is a knife.

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The press cycle preceding Lorde’s new album, Virgin, was one of the most scrutinized of its kind in some time. She has been pressed, during junkets, for more information after saying she doesn’t feel like a man or woman. Fans, editors, and news aggregators gobble up the two or three throwaway lines published in short profiles in magazines like Rolling Stone, Vogue, and GQ. No one mentions the journalists soliciting these quotes—unless fans take them to task for portraying their idols in a negative light. Hero worship can easily obscure the dirt beneath the mythology of a pop star.

As of late, there are few paths for the diva. Her agency is always exaggerated by fans and denied by detractors. In anticipation of her new album, Lorde has been releasing voice notes to fans via a special texting service. It’s as if she’s talking just to you—one-on-one like old pals, sitting down at the tennis court and talking things out. She is a queen of revelation, someone who would like to dispense the mystical wisdom of old à la Florence + the Machine, Kate Bush, or Patti Smith. That’s a tough sell when she still writes with the wide-eyed naivete of a girl discovering the world for the first time. Writing about fame with such feigned innocence can be cloying. She’s disavowed the Solar Power (2021) cycle as a time when she struggled with an intense eating disorder—a dissociative time that she considers somewhat embarrassing. (She’s not alone: Miley Cyrus recently said she wished she hadn’t written most of the songs on her cookie-cutter, grunge-influenced Plastic Hearts, released the previous year.) It makes sense that Lorde wouldn’t want to stand by her least successful album. It also makes sense that the follow-up to the highly praised Melodrama (2017) would always face a troubling reception. She nailed the sophomore album—in many ways, it fared even better critically than her debut album Pure Heroine (2013).

After the cutting witticisms of teenage anthems like “Royals,” “Green Light,” and “Supercut,” the breezy beach tunes on Solar Power seemed trite. She hadn’t come up as one of the artists with the lo-fi, pastel palette of Carly Rae Jepsen, what Hazel Cills dubbed the “slightly hippie-dippie, granola trend of pop girl restraint.” Instead, she was the heir to the feral girl stars of the 1980s and ’90s.

Low-key minimalism is merely one of the superficial microgenres of pop. (Solar Power had a lot in common with Jepsen’s 2022 album The Loneliest Time, Swift’s 2020 folklore, and the work of HAIM, Sabrina Carpenter, and Addison Rae.) For a while, the thing was country pop, donning cowgirl hats in the wake of Kacey Musgraves’s success, as in Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter (2024), Miley’s Younger Now (2017), and Lady Gaga’s Joanne (2016). There have also been the upbeat, house-inspired Renaissance (2022), Chromatica (2020), Brat, and the music of Tove Lo; and grungier records like Cyrus’s Plastic Hearts, or the albums of Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, and Demi Lovato, in her attempted career revival. Many of these moves were predicted by Madonna—soothing electropop on Ray of Light (1998), country on Music (2000), grunge rock on American Life (2003), dance on Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005). Of course, eventually the pop star is cornered—as much by age as genre. She is our ingenue. She can’t be surprised by every award she receives. She must transition into adult contemporary—Ariana Grande has always attempted to ride this wave with her R & B–inspired songs. This seemed to be the move for a few years. But now minimalist beats have been hijacked by Addison Rae, Oklou, Erika de Casier, Clairo, and PinkPantheress. Where’s an aging starlet to go from here?

None of this matters too much if the music is good. If something bangs, we forget about the modes of production. Lorde’s earlier work was like this: transcendent. On Virgin, she tries to summon some of that resplendent teenage mysticism. She has given up both the tequila-soaked dance floor of Melodrama and the weed-fueled power naps of Solar Power. She wants to walk away from absolution, “to take off [her] robes and step into the choir,” as she once so eloquently sang. This might be possible on the dance floors of New Zealand, but in Brooklyn, down at Baby’s All Right, that’s a harder sell. People want a lot from their teenage prophets.

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Every album represents a drug, she once said. On Virgin, Lorde is often coming down from MDMA, whether taking a pregnancy test on “Clearblue” or reliving an old relationship on “What Was That.” She’s doe-eyed with euphoria, praising the feeling of having been born again on album opener “Hammer,” being “ready to feel like I don’t have the answers.” Of course, we know she can do better—she uses the word “truant” only a few seconds later.

Luckily, the occasionally corny lyrics of “Hammer” are a feint. Across Virgin, Lorde’s crisp, clipped phrases are far more cryptic, at least for a pop star of her caliber. Musically, her sonic register is more expansive and beautiful than ever. While the previous expertly executed pronunciation of “punctuation use” is nowhere to be found, there are plenty of esoteric earworms. “Broken Glass” is a visceral standout. Even the wordless chorus of “Hammer” shows what pop stars can do when they work with producers besides Jack Antonoff—most of Virgin is produced by Jim-E Stack. The lilting guitar on “Man of the Year” is a reverb-filled lullaby: “Swish mouthwash, jerk off,” she sings, chronicling the ache of post-breakup boredom. The music videos, however, offer a different story—the vulnerable gender journey Lorde wants us to go on with her. The cringe politics of being in gender flux in the public eye are almost too painful to witness. Critic Sam Bodrojan excellently chronicled this on her Substack in an essay aptly titled “Popstar Is a Type of Transgender.” At least the visuals are beautifully shot. Sam Penn recently shot “ella” at Baby’s All Right, where she dazzled in a sheer, flesh-colored dress. In the “Man of the Year” music video, she undresses before binding her breasts in The New York Earth Room. In the “Hammer” music video, she unfortunately sports locs while surrounded by pigeons.

The all-caps buzzwords that Lorde has used to describe her new album’s tone are occasionally better lyrics than the actual text of Virgin. There’s poetic immediacy to the takeaway themes she throws out when describing the palette: “PERSIMMONS AND WALNUTS,” “THE SOUND OF MY REBIRTH,” “LIKE THE NEW YORK EARTH ROOM,” “BIKING. SMOKING. SWIMMING,” “MAGIC JEWELRY,” “CRISP SPRING SUN,” “FLIRTING WITH THE GUY AT MNZ,” “LARRY THE PIGEON MAN.” (One X user commented that she was posting like Juliana Huxtable.) Meanwhile, her constant use of the word “ovulation” recalls the continual online discourse about whether or not it is misogynistic to make jokes about going through a luteal phase.

By talking openly about sex, partying, and “body horror,” Lorde explores a sort of niche freedom in girlhood. The “girlypop” movement wants fun—the agency to be playful, buoyant, messy. Addison Rae is hitting it big precisely because so many women are tired of being made to feel small, frivolous, and inferior. Bring back fun. Bring back hedonism. Drunk cigarettes, bathroom sex, and fast cars. The times that Lorde excels on Virgin are surprisingly not when she tries to recapture the crazed gremlin art-hoe persona on “Writer in the Dark” or “Hard Feelings/Loveless,” but when she gives in to debauchery. Our bodies are no longer young and blue; teenage wisdom isn’t a currency anymore. There are stakes now. Pregnancy scares, for one.

We want grown-woman pleasures. Across Virgin, Lorde attempts to chart a divine femininity—one that she argues has a masculine side. Something pure, metallic, crystalline, bare. Speaking with Zane Lowe last month, she said she wanted to use less, not more. If she and her producer had a sound—a synth, a beat, a rhythm—available on one song, they pulled it for use on the next one instead. This stripped-back electronica has always suited Lorde. And this time around, she is even more forthcoming about having raw sex. During “Current Affairs,” she sings about the Pamela Anderson sex tape. “GRWM” finds her washing cum off her chest.  On “Shapeshifter,” she considers her body count, wondering if she will ever truly feel fulfilled. Her constant references showcase her voracious love of cock: “Your metal detector hits my precious treasure.” Despite this opalescent ode to heterosexual fucking, there’s a lonely undercurrent to Lorde’s album. Her feral desires hit a dead end, swallowed by a barrage of abrasive and skittering beats. “David” swells until she sings to the stark accompaniment of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon: “Am I ever gon’ love again?” Sometimes wanting to have sex as a woman feels like walking around like a deer in heat, nearly getting hit by cars on the way to the orchard. Screeching cars next to sighs of release.

Nostalgia coats these electronic compositions, sticking to the walls of her lonely apartment. As 30 approaches, hangovers get worse. The day after the party has consequences. Don’t look down. Don’t get dizzy. If “every night I live and die,” as Lorde puts it, I feel the tedium of having a body—the wreckage. All pop music is about aging because all pop stars only have so long under the sun before they must shape-shift. Our girls can only be martyrs so long before they need to become divas or find new careers. “If you’re looking for a savior, / Well, that’s not me,” Lorde sang on her last album. Of course, such nostalgia has always been Lorde’s bread and butter. (“[E]very time I smell tequila / The garden grows up in my mind again,” she sang on “California.”) On Virgin, she tears apart the illusions she once held in favor of clear-eyed hedonism and self-destruction, the kind that can be a baptism by fire. It’s a banger, the kind you put on to dance something out: “I try / To let / Whatever has to pass through me pass through.” Somehow, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor has managed to walk the fine line of pop-stardom, the twin pillars of transformation and originality. Each new orgasm sets her free, and we in turn bear witness.