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I have the impulse, when writing about Lorde’s music, to also write about her audience. It might be because so many of her fans grew into their own personhood alongside her and her work — early high school soundtracked by Pure Heroine, Melodrama as they entered young adulthood — and think of it largely, even primarily, as a conduit to see their own experiences reflected back at them. There are lots of zeitgeist-y words for this kind of thing, parasocialism, projection, so on, although it’s hardly necessary to pathologize the experience of coming to understand yourself through art. (It’s worth mentioning too that this happens to Lorde not because her audience is stupid or immature but because she is just remarkably good at making the personal feel universal and vice versa; when you listen to Supercut it's easy to wonder, for a second, if anyone else has ever written anything about a breakup at all.) The problem arises when the artist in question suddenly makes work that isn’t about us anymore, upon which our own experiences can’t be easily projected. A vague sense of betrayal has cloaked Lorde’s fandom over the past few years, ever since her last album, Solar Power, failed to reflect the pandemic-era nihilism and abjection they were all desperate to metabolize through music-as-therapy. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that seeing a reflection of something you own in a mirror doesn’t mean you own the mirror, and seeing a reflection of yourself in a mirror doesn’t make the mirror You.
I thought about this a lot while listening to Virgin for the first time. It’s an album about gender, about bodies, about sex, about pain: all things that everyone has, but no two people have in quite the same way. It leans industrial, full of screeches and halting drones and harsh shrieks like metal dragged across a concrete floor. There are moments of real ugliness, real vulgarity; Virgin knows that desire can make you hard to look at and even harder to identify with. She writes about watching Pamela Anderson’s sex tape and someone tasting her underwear. The longtime mascot of universal girlhood says that sometimes she feels like a man. I find myself happy, in some undeniably “parasocial“ way, at the idea that Lorde may have escaped the pressure to produce communal experience, to hammer herself into a mirror. Then I listen to the song Favourite Daughter, which is about an artist who seeks validation and fame in a sublimated effort to get closer to their traumatized mother. “You had a brother, I look like him / you told us as kids / he died of a broken heart”, Lorde sings. My mother’s brother died before I was born under (seemingly) similar circumstances; I’ve always said that everything I’ve ever written has been part of an attempt to understand her. I’d never heard a song about that experience before. Go figure.
I thought about this a lot while listening to Virgin for the first time. It’s an album about gender, about bodies, about sex, about pain: all things that everyone has, but no two people have in quite the same way. It leans industrial, full of screeches and halting drones and harsh shrieks like metal dragged across a concrete floor. There are moments of real ugliness, real vulgarity; Virgin knows that desire can make you hard to look at and even harder to identify with. She writes about watching Pamela Anderson’s sex tape and someone tasting her underwear. The longtime mascot of universal girlhood says that sometimes she feels like a man. I find myself happy, in some undeniably “parasocial“ way, at the idea that Lorde may have escaped the pressure to produce communal experience, to hammer herself into a mirror. Then I listen to the song Favourite Daughter, which is about an artist who seeks validation and fame in a sublimated effort to get closer to their traumatized mother. “You had a brother, I look like him / you told us as kids / he died of a broken heart”, Lorde sings. My mother’s brother died before I was born under (seemingly) similar circumstances; I’ve always said that everything I’ve ever written has been part of an attempt to understand her. I’d never heard a song about that experience before. Go figure.
Dec 31, 2025