Everything We Know About Lorde’s ‘Virgin’ So Far

In a note posted to her website when she announced Virgin, Lorde revealed that the project was produced with Jim-E Stack, Fabiana Palladino, Andrew Aged, Buddy Ross, Dan Nigro and Dev Hynes of Blood Orange. Later, she’d reveal that both Stack and Hynes would also be joining her as supporting acts on her Ultrasound Tour in support of the album.

Virgin marks a departure from Lorde’s usual collaborator, Jack Antonoff, who worked on her previous two albums: Melodrama and Solar Power. Of parting ways with the Bleachers frontman, whom she called a “positive, supportive collaborator,” she said in her May Rolling Stone cover story, “I just have to trust when my intuition says to keep moving.”

Lorde’s debut album, Pure Heroine, was produced by Joel Little.

In debuting the Virgin cover, Lorde unveiled what is arguably her most daring album artwork yet. Tinted blue, the photo is an X-ray of a woman’s pelvis, showing her spine, hip bones and IUD installed in her uterus.

It’s also the singer’s first album cover that does not feature her face since Pure Heroine. After it dropped, fans praised her for picking such a “weird” and “intriguing” image to represent the music, with one listener writing on X, “Lorde’s new album being a transparent view of her femininity and the title being a societal construct tied to womanhood and the album cover being an Xray of a woman’s reproductive organs while she’s clothed … oh the symbolism.”

In a statement about the album, Lorde teased that — similar to “What Was That” — Virgin would be an unflinching look at her life and herself over the past few years. “THE COLOUR OF THE ALBUM IS CLEAR,” she wrote. “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.”

The singer added that the project was “100% WRITTEN IN BLOOD.”

In an interview with BBC Radio 1, Lorde revealed that her “Girl, So Confusing” remix collaborator, Charli xcx, motivated her to step up her game on Virgin by releasing such a game-changing album with Brat.

“It forced me to further define what I was doing, because Charli had so masterfully defined everything about Brat, and I knew that what I was doing was very distinct to that,” Lorde said. “It’s an amazing thing when a peer throws the gauntlet down like that, you’re like, ‘OK, I’ve got to pick it up.’ I’ve spoken to a lot of peers who’ve all had the same feeling.”

In an interview with Document Journal ahead of Virgin‘s release, Lorde got candid about struggling with body image and disordered eating around the time she started writing the album. “I had made my body very small, because I thought that that was what you did as a woman and a woman on display,” she told the publication, emphasizing that under-eating only had the effect of making her feel “weak.”

“It was like, ‘I’m not going to put anything out until I’m in my body the way I know I’m supposed to be, to be able to do my work,’” she continued. “That’s all I did the last four years, basically. This album is a byproduct of that process of fully coming into my body and feeling the fullness of my power.”

After she started to recover from her struggles with disordered eating, Lorde says she was able to really recognize the fluidity of her gender for the first time. To Rolling Stone, she shared that the topic is prevalent throughout Virgin, especially on its opening track and a song titled “Man of the Year.” The former, which served as the album’s second single, features the lyric, “Some days I’m a woman/ Some days I’m a man,” while the latter was written after the singer put duct tape over her chest in a moment of trying to find a look “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment.”

“[Chappell Roan] asked me this,” Lorde told the publication when asked how she identifies now. “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.”

According to Lorde, the lyrics on Virgin are blunt, visceral and discuss bodily truths in a way that’s “right on the edge of gross.” “I think coming more into my body, I came into an understanding of the grotesque nature of it and the glory and all these things,” she told Rolling Stone. “I often really tried to hit this kind of gnarliness or grossness. ‘You tasted my underwear.’ I’ve never heard that in a song, you know? It felt like the right way to tell this whole chapter.”

Rooting the album in her own physicality stemmed not just from her eating disorder recovery and gender fluidity, but also from quitting birth control pills, getting an IUD (as seen in the Virgin cover art) and reading books on pregnancy as she was crafting the record. To match the unflinching nature of the writing, Rolling Stone reports that she created sounds that were “percussive and prioritized rhythm,” designed to “work on the body before the brain.”

“This is going to sound crazy, but I said to myself, ‘We get it. You’re smart. You don’t need to telegraph it,’” she added of the project’s lyricism. “Whereas in the past, I’m really trying to craft these lyrics. This time I was like, ‘No, be smart enough to let it be really basic. Be plain with language and see what happens.’”

Shortly before dropping “Man of the Year,” Lorde unveiled the Virgin tracklist, printed on an X-ray photo of a woman’s rib cage. See the songs in order below: