Lorde: Virgin review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Universal)
After her last album embraced switching off, the musician returns to pop’s fray to revel in the mess of late-20s angst with a strikingly unsettled sound

In April, Lorde launched her fourth album with a brief guerrilla gig in New York. A message telling fans to meet her at Washington Square Park – ostensibly for a video shoot – caused chaos, happily of the variety that gets filmed on multiple cameraphones and goes viral on social media. Thousands turned up and the police shut the event down, but those that evaded them were eventually rewarded by Lorde performing to new single What Was That with impressive gusto given that she was standing on a small wooden table at the time.

It was surprising. Lorde’s last release, 2021’s Solar Power, wasn’t the only album of that period on which a female artist who had become famous in her teens strongly suggested that doing so was a living nightmare – Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever and Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts did, too – but it was the only one that sounded like a resignation letter, sent from a beach in Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s native New Zealand: “Won’t take a call if it’s the label or the radio,” she sang at one point. At another: “If you’re looking for a saviour, well that’s not me.” But Solar Power turned out to be merely an out-of-office message. Four years on and Lorde isn’t just back, but apparently back in the sharp-eyed party girl mode of 2017’s Melodrama. What Was That compares falling in love to the sensation of smoking while on MDMA. “It’s a beautiful life, so why play truant?” she shrugs on opener Hammer. “I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.”