I think “Virgin” is probably Lorde’s best album. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the same relationship to it as I have to “Pure Heroine” and “Melodrama,” but we never have quite the same relationship to anything as we do to the music that formed us when we were young. My experience of it – though perhaps this is because it only just came out in full yesterday – is of a coherent whole rather than a collection of songs I will listen to until they are worn thin and overfamiliar. That was my relationship with the tracks off of the earlier two albums, songs that I ranked mentally in terms of which I liked most and which therefore got the most playback. Lorde is only about five months older than I am; I was just starting to develop a taste in music at the time.
(“400 Lux” is the best, to be clear.)
“Virgin,” meanwhile, is a work of difficulty, and about being difficult. Not that it’s hard to listen to, but that its primarily electronic soundscape feels more like the scaffolding around a building under construction than the edifice itself, which is not to say incomplete. Spiky, sudden in moments, and then gone. Its surprises are never as intentionally jarring as production on a Charli XCX album (which is to say, SOPHIE’s production style that Charli largely gets credit for now), and the industrial valences never quite blossom into “fire” beats like “Yeezus” – era Kanye. It’s really the “and then gone” that stands the sound out on its own. That characteristic sparseness casts back towards “Pure Heroine,” before the occasionally overlush bombast of “Melodrama” (and I don’t really want to talk about “Solar Power,” to be honest), but pushes forward from the earlier album’s austere perfection towards a more eccentric, sharply emotive personal groove.
The lyrics, always, are the focus, even as their subjects are hard to keep in focus themselves; a projector-wheel clicking between fine-grained detail and lacunae that’s grasping, compelling. Desire, the biological mechanics of wanting, the way that makes (Makes. Makes?) one act. The panic after we’ve gotten it, or the anger after we’ve lost it, and feeling bad the whole time, judging ourselves the whole time, doing it anyway. Feeling cool for being shitty, feeling shitty for being shitty. Feeling lost like a newborn. Harming our health, knowingly. Femininity, passed down from generations past to be reinterpreted, resented, represented and embodied. Enthralling. Through this comes a self-portrait of deep uncertainty and simultaneous conviction. I think, at least.
But I don’t know if it’s this quality that accounts for the weird feeling I’ve had that I have not actually experienced this album. I’ve listened to it about three times in full, and select tracks out of order a few more times than that, but I feel like something about what it is supposed to be, as a piece of work, keeps slipping through my fingers. Reading the album’s Wikipedia article gives a drive-by of pop-up events Lorde did for the rollout, largely promoted and recorded on social media platforms I’m not on. I guess she performed one of the songs in a YMCA bathroom and streamed it on TikTok. A performance in NY that was shut down by the cops because she never got permits for it. Follow-up voice notes sent out through a mass texting platform to fans in a performance of an interpersonal relationship. Is it because I’m not engaging with this ephemera around the album, that I wasn’t really plugged into the hype cycle and was only pleasantly surprised to realize that it had dropped when it had yesterday and I could now listen to it, that I feel like there is something ghostlike about the work and my interaction with it? Or is that because the album itself is (and I say this as a compliment) slight, strange and sometimes confusing in the way deeply personal work is?
I was put off, in the Zane Lowe interview with Charli XCX around “Brat,” to hear her say explicitly that she talks about music more in terms of marketing than of the actual content of the work. The cranky old Marxist in me rearing his deeply uncool head – “shouldn’t this be about the music?” He says it in an unsteady tone, just as much missing the point as when Adorno criticizes Jazz music like he does so relentlessly. Because this is largely how “music” as a cultural category operates, at least at the sort of scale of artists like these, in a market as mass as they do. Why should Charli insult our intelligence and pretend like this isn’t just as much about marketing? Is this not, necessarily, part of the artistry, and the manipulation of promotion just as much a craft as the manipulation of sounds? Much contemporary art has been making this point, hypercommodified as Capital- T.A.W. “The Art World” is, for like fifty years at this point.
Some of this produces a tendency that I feel justified in not being able to stand; the endless posts and “explainer” videos combing through surface-level easter eggs and conspiracy theory-style narratives in Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar music videos, often feeling like they’re produced in a spiraling feedback loop with the artists themselves so that album rollouts become elaborate aestheticized in-jokes. I hate all this shit. It’s bloat, it’s uninteresting, and it’s a waste of time and attention. No wonder it does so well on Instagram. The [insert artist’s name here] Cinematic Universe.
I saw Lorde perform during the “Melodrama” tour when I was in college. I often refer back to the eclectic lineup on that tour – Mitski and Run The Jewels were the opening acts – as hard to beat. Maybe I just had more time back then, as a college student, watching interviews with Lorde on YouTube promoting the album when I should’ve been finishing my paper on Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” in the library at 1 AM. If an “album” in the modern era is a cultural producer marshaling all the outlets at their disposal to push forward some gestalt something-ness of which the music they’re promoting is only one nodal point in the overall constellation, maybe young, underemployed students with hearts wanting to be swelled and attention spans artificially stunted are just the perfect target audience.
“Music” understood thusly is happening at a sort of scale orders of magnitude beyond the kind of basement-show culture in local “scenes” where the art grows as much out of the social interaction, interpersonal competition and collaboration, as out it does out of anything like a desire to make music. David Byrne’s “How Music Works” makes a convincing case that this is where innovation happens. Whatever. Lorde performed that installment of the “Melodrama” tour in Mohegan Sun and “400 Lux” made me cry, then I left the auditorium and could barely find my way out among the sprawling mass of blackjack tables and big-name stores. Nearly ten years later, and I can’t quite swing the tickets to see “Virgin” on tour. The world feels meaner and stranger and turned further inward, more suited to “Virgin”’s sounds. Maybe this is to say the world feels more adult; maybe that’s just me saying Lorde and I grew up.
“400 Lux” is a song about growing up in the suburbs, the beautiful aimlessness that depressed kids can feel when they start discovering each other just at the moment their hormones are making a mess of everything. The setting sun over the cul-de-sac where you wish you didn’t live doesn’t kill the heat, sleepy in the passenger seat through cracked windows. “I’d like it if you stayed;” a statement of what you’re discovering in yourself rather than an injunction. To the extent that I think I know what “Current Affairs” is about, not having listened to it endlessly of the course of 12 years yet, it’s about being much older than that, but terrified because nothing makes the sort of sense you thought it was going to. Including yourself. And you’ve only made it worse by trying to fix yourself through other people. It isn’t quite a banger, but it’s close, and that feels like part of the point.
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Not Enough Time 
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