In the promotional cycle for her fourth album, Virgin, the New Zealand singer-songwriter has dubbed the record her most authentic to date. What, then, to make of her last effort, Solar Power– a record that purported to do the same thing?
Visual for Lorde’s album single, “Man of the Year”.
Since the announcement of Virgin, Lorde’s fourth album, she has described it as many things. “Rugged, vulnerable and messy,” in a Rolling Stone profile. For the Irish Times: “Visceral, intense, gross”. Where past releases were marked by distinct colour palettes –Melodrama’s violet, for instance – Virgin’s colour is, in Lorde’s own words, “transparent.” The verbal window-dressing belies a simple concept for an album, a concept sure to make label execs dizzy with excitement: authentic.
Lorde is an artist known for her vulnerability and trend-bucking, having first come onto the scene with ‘Royals’ – her unusual electropop satire about wealth which topped charts and won Grammys. However, one way that she has remained similar to her peers is in her lyrical vulnerability. With Lorde, as with the Halseys and Taylor Swifts of the world, biography is often inextricable from narrative. The music essentially doubles as a diary.
As such, each of Lorde’s releases prior to Virgin have also in some way purported to be authentic. Pure Heroine, her 2013 debut, channelled teen angst and alienation via filtered drum machines. Melodrama, widely regarded as her best work, chronicled a vicious breakup through the loose concept of a houseparty and its aftermath. The acoustic-led Solar Power, meanwhile, was framed both as an album about escapism and quarter-life crisis.
Solar Power – Lorde’s last release before Virgin – is a curious entry in her catalogue. For the first time since her mainstream debut eight years prior, her work was met with chilly, polarised reviews. Though the lyrics retained the introspection and poeticism she had become known for, the acoustic production was a sharp pivot from the bassy beats that critics and listeners alike were used to (effectively, Dylan Goes Electric in reverse). In essence, there were – for the first time on a Lorde record – no discernible hits, which seemed to be a point of contention.Consequence called it “background music”; The Washington Post chose “sluggish.”
Lorde noted that the response to Solar Power, a record she’d spent four years developing, was “confounding and […] painful.” More recently, she’s said that the record doesn’t accurately represent her, recently telling Jake Shane of Therapuss, “I think I just am this person who’s meant to make these bangers that fuck us all up.” Following suit, the Virgin singles have ranged from hazy, sweaty synth-pop (‘What Was That’) and cathartic, blown-out bridges (‘Man of the Year’) to big-city, punchy dance drums (‘Hammer’). Bangers? Sure, though not to the annihilatingly intense extent of a ‘Ribs’ or a ‘Supercut.’
The lyrics of each single, as well as the Virgin album from which they’re derived, aim to be “raw, primal, innocent, elegant, openhearted, spiritual, masc” – reflections of Lorde’s newfound view of her femininity as fluid. With the release of eachsingle, she couples it with a short paragraph of her trademark word salad on her website, then signs off with “the sound of my rebirth.” Rebirth – that’s the word that seems most fitting for this new Lorde era.
For an artist as consistently autobiographical in their work as she is, it’s interesting that she’s all but disavowed Solar Power, a record itself promoted as a document of looking “to the natural world for answers,” after a period of “heartache, grief, deep love, [and] confusion.” (Read: authentic.) Essentially selling Virgin as a return to form (upon its release, ‘What Was That’ was heralded as the return of Melodrama’s beloved synth-pop sound) belies the introspection of prior records, as though those past selves were themselves false.
Herein lies the problem with baking your personal life into your music: when you grow and change as a person, you risk discrediting past iterations of yourself, your mistakes, your misgivings, and rendering them – gasp! – inauthentic. Lorde has said as much of her 2021 self, again telling Shane, “Me disappearing and being all wafty and on the beach […] I don’t think this is me.” She misunderstands herself, though; relistening to Solar Power now, it isn’t ‘wafty’ or, as some have claimed, ‘out-of-touch.’ Lorde’s relocation to her home of rural New Zealand might be geographically unfamiliar to most of us, but her confessions of climate anxiety and fear of growing up remain deeply human.
The funny thing is, people do – as Lorde has – grow and change, for better and for worse. During Solar Power’s promotion, she noted that she’d turned her phone to grayscale mode to help her use it less; the aforementioned Rolling Stone article from this past May claimed that she’s “never been more addicted to my phone.” It’s an obviously funny admission, but a deeply relatable one, too. This year alone has been hell on earth if you look at the news, and retreating to the beach simply isn’t an option for many of us. Oftentimes, the online world seems like the only reprieve.
Even amidst The Horrors of modern existence, though, each of us has undoubtedly had moments of joy in the past year too. This dichotomy exists within everyone, sometimes uncomfortably, but irrevocably present. In the same way, Lorde’s different selves – the thorny anxiety of Pure Heroine, the seismic heartbreak of Melodrama, the stoned paranoia of Solar Power, the raw confrontation of Virgin – are aspects that, contrary to what Lorde seems to believe, can coexist within her.
Lorde’s new persona does directly challenge her previous one, but it doesn’t need to invalidate it entirely. In fact, some artists celebrate the coexistence of their past and present selves; Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras Tour, over the course of a three-hour concert, revisited past albums with a fresh lens, with older material like 2008’s Fearless being presented alongside more recent work like 2022’s Midnights. Though the constant artistic and aesthetic reinvention expected of women artists is unfair, it’s also – for Swift as well as Lorde – part and parcel of making autobiographical, authentic music. When you change as a person, so, naturally, does your artistic output. (As Lorde might put it: “All the music you loved at sixteen you’ll grow out of.”)
What is authenticity though? If we, as people, are doomed to evolve, then authenticity is a permanently moving target, and to disown past selves is to miss the target entirely. Growth doesn’t invalidate the people we were before. For Lorde, it’d be wrong to say that the journey from Solar Power to Virgin reflects a finding of one’s truest self; instead, those records – and by extension, her whole discography – creates a kaleidoscope of personae, all real, all hers. I wonder, then, how long it’ll be until the Lorde of Virgin becomes just another persona to outgrow.
– – –
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected]
– – –
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know.
– – –
Listen to our podcast ‘Queer News & Journalism’ on your favourite podcast platform.
Archie Marks is the Pop Culture Editor for GAY45 and Digital Editor of Redbrick. He also writes on his own Substack while studying English and Creative Writing.
Lorde’s Persona Problem: How Many Selves Can a Pop Star Have?
In the promotional cycle for her fourth album, Virgin, the New Zealand singer-songwriter has dubbed the record her most authentic to date. What, then, to make of her last effort, Solar Power– a record that purported to do the same thing?
Since the announcement of Virgin, Lorde’s fourth album, she has described it as many things. “Rugged, vulnerable and messy,” in a Rolling Stone profile. For the Irish Times: “Visceral, intense, gross”. Where past releases were marked by distinct colour palettes –Melodrama’s violet, for instance – Virgin’s colour is, in Lorde’s own words, “transparent.” The verbal window-dressing belies a simple concept for an album, a concept sure to make label execs dizzy with excitement: authentic.
Lorde is an artist known for her vulnerability and trend-bucking, having first come onto the scene with ‘Royals’ – her unusual electropop satire about wealth which topped charts and won Grammys. However, one way that she has remained similar to her peers is in her lyrical vulnerability. With Lorde, as with the Halseys and Taylor Swifts of the world, biography is often inextricable from narrative. The music essentially doubles as a diary.
As such, each of Lorde’s releases prior to Virgin have also in some way purported to be authentic. Pure Heroine, her 2013 debut, channelled teen angst and alienation via filtered drum machines. Melodrama, widely regarded as her best work, chronicled a vicious breakup through the loose concept of a houseparty and its aftermath. The acoustic-led Solar Power, meanwhile, was framed both as an album about escapism and quarter-life crisis.
Solar Power – Lorde’s last release before Virgin – is a curious entry in her catalogue. For the first time since her mainstream debut eight years prior, her work was met with chilly, polarised reviews. Though the lyrics retained the introspection and poeticism she had become known for, the acoustic production was a sharp pivot from the bassy beats that critics and listeners alike were used to (effectively, Dylan Goes Electric in reverse). In essence, there were – for the first time on a Lorde record – no discernible hits, which seemed to be a point of contention. Consequence called it “background music”; The Washington Post chose “sluggish.”
Lorde noted that the response to Solar Power, a record she’d spent four years developing, was “confounding and […] painful.” More recently, she’s said that the record doesn’t accurately represent her, recently telling Jake Shane of Therapuss, “I think I just am this person who’s meant to make these bangers that fuck us all up.” Following suit, the Virgin singles have ranged from hazy, sweaty synth-pop (‘What Was That’) and cathartic, blown-out bridges (‘Man of the Year’) to big-city, punchy dance drums (‘Hammer’). Bangers? Sure, though not to the annihilatingly intense extent of a ‘Ribs’ or a ‘Supercut.’
The lyrics of each single, as well as the Virgin album from which they’re derived, aim to be “raw, primal, innocent, elegant, openhearted, spiritual, masc” – reflections of Lorde’s newfound view of her femininity as fluid. With the release of each single, she couples it with a short paragraph of her trademark word salad on her website, then signs off with “the sound of my rebirth.” Rebirth – that’s the word that seems most fitting for this new Lorde era.
For an artist as consistently autobiographical in their work as she is, it’s interesting that she’s all but disavowed Solar Power, a record itself promoted as a document of looking “to the natural world for answers,” after a period of “heartache, grief, deep love, [and] confusion.” (Read: authentic.) Essentially selling Virgin as a return to form (upon its release, ‘What Was That’ was heralded as the return of Melodrama’s beloved synth-pop sound) belies the introspection of prior records, as though those past selves were themselves false.
Herein lies the problem with baking your personal life into your music: when you grow and change as a person, you risk discrediting past iterations of yourself, your mistakes, your misgivings, and rendering them – gasp! – inauthentic. Lorde has said as much of her 2021 self, again telling Shane, “Me disappearing and being all wafty and on the beach […] I don’t think this is me.” She misunderstands herself, though; relistening to Solar Power now, it isn’t ‘wafty’ or, as some have claimed, ‘out-of-touch.’ Lorde’s relocation to her home of rural New Zealand might be geographically unfamiliar to most of us, but her confessions of climate anxiety and fear of growing up remain deeply human.
The funny thing is, people do – as Lorde has – grow and change, for better and for worse. During Solar Power’s promotion, she noted that she’d turned her phone to grayscale mode to help her use it less; the aforementioned Rolling Stone article from this past May claimed that she’s “never been more addicted to my phone.” It’s an obviously funny admission, but a deeply relatable one, too. This year alone has been hell on earth if you look at the news, and retreating to the beach simply isn’t an option for many of us. Oftentimes, the online world seems like the only reprieve.
Even amidst The Horrors of modern existence, though, each of us has undoubtedly had moments of joy in the past year too. This dichotomy exists within everyone, sometimes uncomfortably, but irrevocably present. In the same way, Lorde’s different selves – the thorny anxiety of Pure Heroine, the seismic heartbreak of Melodrama, the stoned paranoia of Solar Power, the raw confrontation of Virgin – are aspects that, contrary to what Lorde seems to believe, can coexist within her.
Lorde’s new persona does directly challenge her previous one, but it doesn’t need to invalidate it entirely. In fact, some artists celebrate the coexistence of their past and present selves; Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras Tour, over the course of a three-hour concert, revisited past albums with a fresh lens, with older material like 2008’s Fearless being presented alongside more recent work like 2022’s Midnights. Though the constant artistic and aesthetic reinvention expected of women artists is unfair, it’s also – for Swift as well as Lorde – part and parcel of making autobiographical, authentic music. When you change as a person, so, naturally, does your artistic output. (As Lorde might put it: “All the music you loved at sixteen you’ll grow out of.”)
What is authenticity though? If we, as people, are doomed to evolve, then authenticity is a permanently moving target, and to disown past selves is to miss the target entirely. Growth doesn’t invalidate the people we were before. For Lorde, it’d be wrong to say that the journey from Solar Power to Virgin reflects a finding of one’s truest self; instead, those records – and by extension, her whole discography – creates a kaleidoscope of personae, all real, all hers. I wonder, then, how long it’ll be until the Lorde of Virgin becomes just another persona to outgrow.
– – –
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected]
– – –
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know.
– – –
Listen to our podcast ‘Queer News & Journalism’ on your favourite podcast platform.
We appreciate it. Thanks for reading.
Author
Archie Marks is the Pop Culture Editor for GAY45 and Digital Editor of Redbrick. He also writes on his own Substack while studying English and Creative Writing.