Lorde: Virgin Review album | Fork

These experiences they are looking for are intensely physical, but not as glamorous or easily aestheticized as you expect from a pop artist. Twenty seconds after opening “Hammer“, Lorde exit a word that I would bet has never been heard in the hot 100 -” ovulation ” – and follows it with” certain days I am a woman / certain days I am a man “, a striking subversion, although unusually frank, subversion of biological essentialism. On VirginHis song is visceral and sometimes – there is no other word – orgasmic. Her relationship with her own body is complicated by her story of food disorder, which she freely refers through the album. But in his story, living in a human body is also sublime (“the fringement of the fountain embraces my neck”) and cathartic (“I roll you until I cry”). And it is abject: it is sperm on your chest and your acid reflux to vomit and pee on a stick because you could be pregnant.

This last vignette comes from “Clearblue”, a spare whirlwind of Vocoder Mélodie at the Tas of imogena. It is the whole voice of Lorde, words crossing her tongue like ribbons curling against a blade while she tells a scary of pregnancy that blurred the boundaries between intimacy and independence. The incident passes, becoming a precious reminder of its own vitality; The test a relic, lost against the trash. But the subject of motherhood remains powerful. The presence of Lorde’s mother, the poet Sonja Yelich, is felt through the album – in particular on “Favorite Daughter”, a sparkling number where Lorde imagines her own career as the fulfillment of her mother’s ambitions. The choice of the cover of Lorde’s album is also significant: Heji Shin, the photographer who has struck off his basin, is perhaps better known for her Raw images of coronation of newborns. Documents of the grotesque and the generative potential of the human body, they can also be read as a metaphors of the bloody work of creativity.

Now 28 years old, Lorde cannot be carefully mapped over the continuum of youth to femininity at maternity. It is the consequence of being known as a perennial alcoholismA sage for 16 years, and now also a kind of mother for her dozens of musical descendants. (She calls her fans her “children” too.) She arrives at this state of multitude on “GRWM”, declaring herself “an adult woman in a baby tee” – an objectively stupid word that she is quite confident to succeed. The production here, as on a large part of the disc, is minimal – a ratcation of rattling and stabs of synth, adding muscles but not loose and pushing the voice and words of Lorde in the foreground.

It is for a long time his writing which telegraph the capital of Lorde-A artisther. Where someone loves Charli XCX wants to move the culture, and Addison Rae Knows how to want to make a good show, Lorde is happy to sweat it in the Notes application. The work of music, it seems, is above all not to put yourself on your way. “Shapeshifter” is a big brand, a little text painting that starts with a skeletal garage rhythm, gradually shaded until it strikes you with a complete color bleeding. This song moves; He reflects the state of constant flow on which Lorde sings. Virgin could bear to have more than this synergy – production keys as bizarre and unpredictable as the person in their center. Instead, there are glitchy vocal fragments and bizarre samples that we have heard before. There is so much negative space, it almost looks like teasing, because that involves everything that could fill it.

But this sense of ecstatic possibility – many things at the same time, to follow your impulses in all directions, all the time – is the animation force of Virgin. Some would be intimidated by the enormity of the perspective. Not lorde: “I swim in waters that would drown so many other sluts,” she crossed on “if she could see me now”. It is not difficult to see why it is attracted to another stop during the Lorde de New York tour: Walter of Maria Earthroom (1977), a SOHO loft filled with 250 cubic yards of dirt. Lorde recreated it in his video for “Man of the year“, Where she binds her chest with adhesive tape and beats in the soil, exploited in a certain elementary life force. The original installation has been there for almost 50 years; Nothing is growing. Everything is pregnant with abstract possibility, mature for interpretation. It looks like a portal wherever you want to go.