Lorde’s ‘Virgin’: All 11 Tracks Ranked

When a pop artist follows a specific release pattern over the course of their career, it’s easy to assume that a new album and corresponding promotional cycle are all part of a pre-ordained plan, meant to deliver fresh art for more commerce at regular intervals. That’s why, when 2025 began, a new Lorde album and tour felt like safe bets for the calendar year — considering that, since she was a teen prodigy from New Zealand, she had released a full-length every four years, followed by an extended live run and then a period relatively out of the spotlight, until she returned four years later. Her last album, Solar Power, came out in 2021. We just knew that this particular pop comet was due to re-enter our orbit soon enough.

But artists do not create like clockwork, and behind the scenes, Lorde, now 28, was wondering not whether she would release a new album on schedule, but if she would release one at all. “In 2023 I thought for sure I didn’t have any more music in me and all this was over,” she wrote on Instagram two days before the release of her fourth album, Virgin.

The promotional campaign for this album has involved tales of a bitter breakup and body dysmorphia, creeping feelings of stage fright and questions about her gender identity. Instead of retreating from the intimate pressure points and personal changes that have defined her mid-twenties, she poured them into a new album, and is now hoisting them up for the world to see. One listen to Lorde’s Virgin confirms that it is by far the bravest album of her career.

Yet repeated plays showcase the expertly crafted nuances of the project — which Lorde largely created with producer Jim-E Stack, and which was deeply informed by the concrete rhythms of New York City. Gone are the sun-kissed arrangements of Solar Power, replaced by raw, brawny beats; Virgin is dominated by drums, and sometimes the songs bend in service of their percussion more than Lorde’s voice.

Whether she’s singing about pain, enlightenment or their symbiotic relationship, however, Lorde remains an authoritative pop singer-songwriter, brimming with piercing lines and always delivering them with expressive care. The style and subjects may shift, but the fundamental, self-possessed talent does not.

Virgin is a knowingly messy album, full of left-turn song structures, untamed physicality and giant rhetorical questions placed in small, hushed sequences. The path between albums three and four was not an easy one for Lorde, but that journey resulted in an artistic shake-up that’s downright triumphant. Whether her next project is four years, four months or forty years away, Lorde remains a pop artist worth investing in, now and long-term.

Below, see Billboard’s preliminary ranking of the 11 songs from Lorde’s Virgin.