It’s been four days since Ella Yelich-O’Connor, known to you and I as Lorde, released her fourth studio album, Virgin. With 11 tracks, the project is a return to the New Zealand singer’s buzzy, hardcore confessional pop style. As fans dissect the many subtle references and hidden gems Lorde wove into her songs and album rollout, they’ve already begun piecing together the record’s central themes.

To make things easier, we’ve put together a starter pack breaking down the key elements and themes shaping the beginning of the Virgin era.

MDMA 

If you delve deep into Lorde’s internet fan lore, you’ll find theories about the different substances that can be associated with each one of her albums. Pure Heroine as teenage drinking, Melodrama as MDMA and Solar Power as a weed or cannabis trip. But when she dropped the first single from Virgin, “What Was That,” and sang in the chorus, “MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up”, it became clear that the drug was a theme of this album too. 

Over the last few months, she has spoken candidly about her use of MDMA therapy to help her stage fright and release suppressed emotions. “Some of these things live very deep in the body, and you hold on to it,” she told Stephen Colbert last week. “You hold on to a response like stage fright for reasons that no amount of talk therapy or brain use could get at. But when you bypass that and get to the body, something shifts. And that totally happened for me.”

In comparison to Melodrama, where the messiness of drugs and partying is bluntly outlined, on Virgin she does not speak directly about her experience with MDMA therapy, and arguably that’s kind of the point. Seamlessly woven into the lyrics like a half-remembered dream, it contributes to the emotional excavation unfolding throughout the album. It’s less about the drug itself and more about the parts of herself it allowed her to reach and, in turn, share. (HD)

BIRTH CONTROL 

On the first line of Virgin’s opening track “Hammer”, Lorde sings "There’s a heat in the pavement, my mercury’s raising / Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation”. Since beginning her press tour, she has spoken about getting off the hormonal contraceptive pill and how it made her feel. In an interview with Rolling Stone, she revealed that she hadn‘t ovulated in 10 years. “When I ovulated for the first time, I cannot describe to you how crazy it was. One of the best drugs I’ve ever done.” A lot of Virgin delves deep into Lorde’s relationship with her reproductive health: the track “Clearblue” is about the swell of emotions that comes from taking a pregnancy test, and on the album’s cover art, we see an IUD floating around an X-ray of her abdomen. (HD)

DUCT TAPE 

When Lorde joined Charli xcx to perform “Girl, So Confusing remix” at Coachella earlier this year, her outfit was surprisingly simple (at least, in comparison to Charli’s micro hot-pants, crop top and knee-high boots). However, a single piece of duct tape was stuck to her boot like a makeshift toe-cap – the same piece of tape that eagle-eyed fans had spotted in her TikTok video several days prior. A coincidence? Maybe. But when paired with the images of her iPhone all taped up from November 2024, plus a tape-inspired Thom Browne Met Gala dress, it became a clear easter egg. Then came the artwork and music video for the second single from her album, “Man of the Year”, showing the singer with her chest taped. She has since said that the taping felt like an accurate representation of her gender at the time. “It scared me what I saw,” she told Rolling Stone. “I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy.” Lorde’s new chapter has allowed her to explore her gender more deeply than ever before, the tape being a vital part of that. (IVD)

X-RAYS / TRANSPARENCY 

Say what you want about the new Virgin vinyl artwork, depicting Lorde’s bare crotch covered by see-through plastic trousers, but it’s certainly on brand. Transparency has formed a central motif of Virgin ever since Lorde’s initial teaser post, which states that “the colour of the album is clear”, leaving her with “nowhere to hide”. It’s present in the original album artwork depicting an x-ray image of Lorde’s pelvis, the transparent spit running down her face in “What Was That”, and the general fixation with water across visualisers for “Hammer”, “Clearblue” and “GRWM” – not to mention the fluid synths that form Virgin’s sonic backbone. For Lorde, each of these elements seems to represent a direct confrontation of her essential being, matching her most personal subject matter yet on the project. It’s a visual, sonic and lyrical purity that some might even describe as… Virginal. (SPM)

ELEMENTAL ORES 

Virgin is an ore forged under pressure, and each track fractures its surface to reveal a gleaming quartz at its core. While metals and minerals have always been part of Lorde’s lexicon (a moment for “Precious Metals” here), Virgin mines this imagery to its core. Lyrics are scattered with stones, crystals and shards of glass, used to translate the themes of a rebirth and rawness that sits at the record’s centre. On standout track, “Shapeshifter”, Lorde asks: “Do you have the stones?” It’s a phrase extracted from a flyer she spotted in New York’s East Village, which soon became a touchstone while making Virgin (she even got it put on a hat). No stranger to being inspired by earthly matters, in the “Man of the Year” video, she also dances around in a room covered in soil. (TM)