Lorde’s fourth studio album, Virgin, was released on June 27, 2025. The synth-pop album was preceded by the singles What Was That, Man of the Year, and Hammer. These were the perfect songs to use for the album rollout because they still don’t fully encapsulate the album; they aren’t stealing the experience of listening to it from us, embodying what a teaser should be. The song that encapsulates Lorde’s Virgin is “Clearblue” with its absence of instrumentals and themes of sexual freedom, generational trauma, and self-discovery.
In a song, we expect instrumentals: drums, a bass, maybe a trumpet, but with Clearblue, Lorde gives us nothing. The absence of instrumentals helps set a tone of emptiness, connecting to the theme of the song. The album uses electric guitars and synthesizers consistently, giving it an almost manufactured feel, as if you are in an empty studio listening to sound waves hit the walls back and forth. The song opens with Lorde’s vocals hitting you like a brick on their own, with nothing else around it, nothing to soften the blow of her words. Slowly throughout the song, her vocals are layered on top of each other and reverbed, almost like an echo. The absence of instrumentals helps convey the album’s consistency with its emptiness, the fact that the lyrics, vocals, and overall message are supposed to be on display and right in your face.
Coming off the high of Current Affairs, Clearblue, track seven on the album, has a more somber and isolating tone. Lorde experiences an accidental pregnancy. The track starts bluntly coming down from the high of sex and seeing the after effects. Lorde is scared to be vulnerable with the person she had sex with despite letting the person inside of her literally saying, “I’m scared to let you see into the whole machine, leave it all on the field. Your metal detector hits my precious treasure”. The physical pleasure Lorde is getting sheds the pressures of identity and expectations, she’s “nobody’s daughter”, there is no one she has to please. As she has said in many interviews, the album is “raw” and “pure”, and this song embodies that. With daughters, they carry a part of their mothers with them, their traumas, their fears, their nervous system, and pass that down to their daughters and their daughters and their daughters. Lorde fears the “broken blood in [her] passed through [her] mother from her mother down to [her]”. Creating a being with a similar face and mind to you when you fear yourself is terrifying. Lorde’s poetic exploration of these difficult themes helps put listeners in her shoes and understand the album overall.
In an interview with Zane Lowe, Lorde spoke about “healing all the Ellas” and this album helped her do that. Virgin was a piece of Ella that she shared with us. The beauty of the album is the rawness and barrenness, because we can feel her hunger, her emptiness. The bluntness tells us that these lyrics are important, they were chosen carefully and they are her. Clearblue embodies Virgin, Clearblue embodies Ella.
Works Cited
“Lorde – Clearblue.” Genius, 2025, genius.com/Lorde-clearblue-lyrics. Accessed 11 Sept. 2025.
Lorde. Virgin. Universal New Zealand and Republic Records, 27 June 2025
“Lorde.” Apple Podcasts, 26 June 2025, podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lorde/id1461515071?i=1000714694457. Accessed 11 Sept. 2025.
