New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde released her fourth studio album “Virgin” on June 27, 2025.
It marks is her first album in four years since the 2021 album “Solar Power”.
The album comprises 11 tracks, including “Current Affairs”, which samples Dexta Daps' “Morning Love”, and “If She Could See Me Now”, which interpolates Baby Bash's “Suga Suga” featuring Frankie J.
She recorded the album at Smile Sound, Flux in New York, and at Barefeet Welcome, Panther Palace, Heavy Duty in Los Angeles, with co-producers Jim-E Stack, Dan Nigro, and Buddy Ross.
Lorde said of the album, “The colour of the album is clear. Like bathwater, windows, ice, spit. Full transparency. The language is plain and unsentimental. The sounds are the same wherever possible. I was trying to see myself, all the way through. I was trying to make a document that reflected my femininity: raw, primal, innocent, elegant, openhearted, spiritual, masc. I'm proud and scared of this album. There's nowhere to hide. I believe that putting the deepest parts of ourselves to music is what sets us free.”
The album cover art features an X-ray of a pelvis with a visible IUD.
She was diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of PMS that causes debilitating mood swings, among other symptoms. Since then, she has had inserted the IUD.
She told Jack Saunders of BBC Radio 1 about the album cover art, “This album, for me, is honestly just about going straight to the core of who I am in the purest way possible, stripping away anything unnecessary and I also, making this album, talked a lot about trying to reflect my femininity, which I didn't have the perfect document that reflected that and so I feel like the cover reflected that.”
Lorde shared on social media, “For a long time an album is just a handful of word docs and Logic sessions, a couple whiteboards, a raw image from a medical scanner in an undisclosed country lol. I tried to love Virgin right the way through these stages at the same time as I was learning to love myself in my many stages of change, growth, brokenness and wholeness.”
She continued, “I'm still in shock and awe that so many of my heroes worked on Virgin - it has changed me collaborating with people this good, they'll get a separate post, I'm already extremely behind on this fucking post and pulling up at the festival again rn it'll never leave my drafts if I don't keep moving X{D but today very very special thanks go to Jimmy Stack for a collaboration so all in, fun, supportive, moving and inspiring that it really can't be put into words.”
She added, “This album broke me apart and forged a new creature out of me. I am so proud to stand before you today as her, grateful for this beautiful life spent singing to myself and to you, for as long as you'll have me. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart, down to my cells.”
Lorde explained track-by-track for the album.
“Hammer” via Rolling Stone “[Chappell Roan] asked me this. She was like, 'So, are you nonbinary now?' And I was like, 'I'm a woman except for the days when I'm a man.' I know that's not a very satisfying answer, but there's a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
“What Was That” “I've never felt more intentional with every single piece of what I'm doing. There's such a deep ethos behind all of it, and it all braids together in the end. one of my favorite songs I've ever written. Late 2023. Back in new york. Deep breakup. Stopping birth control. Every meal a battle. Flashbacks and waves. Feeling grief's vortex and letting it take me. Opening my mouth and recording what fell out. Jimmy shouting in the background. A thousand hours of audio embroidery. Dan telling us where the moog bass should go. Andrew giving it teeth. The night we finally got the drums right. The sound of my rebirth.”
“Shapeshifter” via Apple Music Jimmy brought me those drums, they immediately felt like something that wanted to be in my world. I basically wrote the whole melody without lyrics um and then that sort of like showed me what the song was wanting to be about, like 'Favourite Daughter' was all melody for a good couple weeks then I was like, 'Wait, I think I can feel what this is, what words are like trying to be said here,' so 'Shapeshifter' was like that but I always knew it was going to be about this thing of kind of using sex for validation and it really felt like this story that had always sort of gone to the middle of the list, it didn't feel like life or death that I had to tell this story but once I got single I was like, 'No, this does want to be told.' I remember I'd been looking at the Tracey Emin work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, which is this incredible tent and kind of all these names of people that she slept with, both sort of platonically and sexually, and all this stuff, just sort of tapping into this lineage of female artists that just make this very kind of primal raw work. It's a very specific thing that I think a lot of women understand, I mean not just women probably, but writing that chorus I really felt something release in me. All the things that I've been to you to try and get some sort of validation to try and kind of fit, some sort of little thing to put something right in me. I don't know, I didn't even arrive anywhere, I didn't get to any kind of resolution meaning wise, I just wanted to take a moment and be like, 'Fuck.'”
“Man of the Year” “Man Of The Year. An offering from really deep inside me. The song I'm proudest of on Virgin. Biking. Smoking. Swimming. New strength in my shoulders. Feeling something awakening. First taping my chest. So scared to be him. The GQ party. Laying back on the white couch w the mic in my hand and letting it happen. Sun. Persimmons and walnuts. Vocals with ams. Trying to make it sound like a Fontana, like painting bitten by a man, like the New York earth room. The sound of my rebirth.”
“Favourite Daughter” via Apple Music
“That song is about my relationship with my mom who is the reason that I do everything that I do. She is the blueprint for me. But it's also as much as it's about my mom you, when I'm saying, 'All the medals I won for you, breaking my back to be your favorite daughter,' I have felt that I was also singing to an audience. There's been this dynamic for the last 10, 12 years and then further back obviously, of wanting so badly to be loved and to get this approval and to be the favorite and it was really moving to me how even as I was sort singing through this song about about my sort of foremost idol and the person who I you know think is the most amazing in the world, I was also singing about this crazy thing it is to kind of have happen to you what I had happened to me at 16 and sort of just all of a sudden be another plane, another show, another plane, another show.”
“Current Affairs” via triple j “I think there are lines in 'Current Affairs' and 'Clearblue' that are pretty not safe for work, that felt kind of shocking to me, and profound too, I think. I didn't realize that I'd been wanting to hear a woman talk about sex the way I was talking about sex in this album.”
“Clearblue” via Therapuss with Jane Shane “There's a song that I love so much called 'Clearblue' that is about unprotected sex and just this experience of like taking a pregnancy test and this like flood of emotions that goes through your body, whatever you want it to say, it's such a moment and that whole song just destroys me. I can't even really listen to it.”
“GRWM” via triple j
“I mean, that song did make me laugh a lot. It's my 'fuckgirl' song. It's kinda dumb and horny, it's so bonbastic, the drum language. We been working on it for a long time and had built up all these cool layers. We have Buddy Ross on that song who's an incredible musician and producer who added so much to that. We'd done all these cool drums and there was all of this stuff going on and we kept getting to this, 'My hips, tooth chipped, 96,' and I was like, 'Ah, it's just not happening.' Everything out, just drums, lose it all, it's all gone, it's nothing else there, just drums and vocals and I think that feels so indicative of the version approach, in terms of what about only what needs to be there being there.”
“Broken Glass” via Therapuss with Jane Shane
“There's a song called 'Broken Glass' that I finished writing two weeks before we handed in the album and we'd been working on it for like a year and I just couldn't, it was just so stuck in me and I was just like, 'Let it out, let it out, do it, bitch, you're done,' because there is this thing when you write a song, you kind of let go of it, releases the bit of tension that you'd been holding around that subject and I really find this about pop music generally, because it's such a release. Pop music at its best's so cathartic. That works on my body, as well, I'm like, 'I'm set free from that thing that I was struggling with,' and the song 'Broken Glass' is totally totally like that. But I literally just walked out of the studio, I was like, 'I'm just going home,' and I walked back to my house and ate something, I just had to get out of the fucking studio.”
“If She Could See Me Now” via Apple Music
“We wrote that song and I was sitting alone on the like steps of my Airbnb and I was kind of stoned and it was late at night and I was sitting listening to it on my phone and some kids rode past on the line and tried to steal my phone and we touched hands around the phone and I was like, 'No!' It was a cool moment, like kind of early demo. They didn't get the phone.”
“David” via Apple Music
“There's a lot of strength to this album and I always felt that the end needed to be a real breakdown of that. I feel completely vulnerable on that song and even how we treat the vocal, it's so human, I felt this journey happening through the song, it sort of comes to this big quite machine-made climax, there's something very almost immortal about and then I'm back to being really mortal again at the end. I don't know, a lot of the songs on this album, I just sort of followed them, I didn't really understand the song when it was coming out and I kept feeling this composite of memories but it feels undeniable to me and inevitable in this album that that's the biggest I've ever been, the climax of that song.”
