Lorde with "Virgin" in her luggage The pop icon plays to a sold-out audience in Zurich

Lorde returns with her fourth studio album. With "Virgin", the musician reinvents herself. Perfect for a summer that feels more like questions than answers.

Somehow it has come about that every summer gets a name. Last year it was the Brat summer, this year it's the Lorde summer. Ella Yelich-O'Connor, better known as Lorde, is releasing a new album. On Friday, June 27, "Virgin" will be released.

An album that is already shaping the summer before it is even officially out. It all began in April with a 15-second TikTok clip in which the 28-year-old musician teased a new song. A few days later, she posts a picture from Washington Square Park on her Instagram story and announces a spontaneous performance.

Her fans show up. Naturally. So many that the police break up the event due to a lack of a permit. "I'm really amazed at how many of you came!!!" Lorde writes in her Instagram story. She later turns up anyway and dances in front of the crowd to "What Was That". The first song from her new album, which she announced in her TikTok and released after the performance in Washington Square Park.

"Does Lorde know she's famous?" asks New York Magazine in response.

Lorde became famous in 2013 at the age of just 16, when her debut album "Pure Heroine" was released. The album is somewhat dark, the sound reduced to a minimum, electronic and yet very poppy.

The song "Royals", in which she criticizes the consumer frenzy and status symbols of the pop world, is played all over the world. A soundtrack for young people who find themselves somewhere between teenage angst, melancholy and quiet rebellion. The album "Melodrama" followed in 2017, in which Lorde sings about love dramas and partying.

The voice of a generation

Whenever a female singer is once again conjured up as the new big pop phenomenon (Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan), they are all people who were influenced by Lorde at the time. "I think Lorde's voice is really the voice of a generation," pop star Olivia Rodrigo tells Rolling Stone. "I don't know a modern songwriter who hasn't been influenced by her."

After that, Lorde went quiet. Something new will not be released until 2021 with "Solar Power". An album that feels like a rebrand. Lorde wears yellow and sunny clothes, is light and optimistic. The music is more folk, more acoustic guitar, but "Solar Power" is received cautiously and does not meet all expectations.

She will later say that she had an eating disorder during the time surrounding "Solar Power". She starved herself, counted calories and controlled her body. She also split up with her long-term partner. As a result, Lorde moves house, lives alone and tries to get to know herself better.

Raw, original, innocent

All of this comes together on the new album "Virgin". Lorde is starting anew - and yet "Virgin" is not a classic new beginning, but rather a rebirth. She doesn't simply leave her old self behind her, but dismantles it layer by layer, mourns, reconstructs. Only to arrive back at herself in the end.

Or, as Lorde writes in an e-mail to her fans: "I tried to see myself in its entirety. I tried to create a document that reflects my femininity: raw, primal, innocent, elegant, open-hearted, spiritual, masculine." The album is a return to a "really essential, pure" version of herself, she says in an interview with "Rolling Stone".

That's how the album sounds, again more in the style of "Pure Heroine" and "Melodrama". At the same time, Lorde limits herself less, neither in her sound nor in her own body.

In the music video for the song "Man of the Year", she tapes off her breasts. Her gender "expanded a lot more when I gave my body more space", she explains to Rolling Stone. Gender is fluid for Lorde, she doesn't want to put herself in boxes.

"Some days I'm a woman, some days I'm a man," Lorde also sings in "Hammer", the last single she released before the album. A track that she herself describes on Instagram as an "ode to city life and horniness". Lorde sings:

I'm ready to feel like I have no answers

There's peace in the madness above our heads

I don't know if it's love or if it's ovulation

Her music used to sound like the soundtrack to a coming-of-age movie, for teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, lost between world-weariness and self-discovery. The new Lorde appeals to twentysomethings slowly approaching thirty and realizing how little they actually know about life.

"There will be a lot of people who won't think I'm a good girl anymore," she tells Rolling Stone. "For a lot of people it will be over, and for some people I will have arrived."

Maybe the Lorde summer is exactly what we need in 2025

And that's exactly what Lorde Summer is all about: evolving. "It's a second teenage existence, but with better jeans and a stronger sense of self," writes Vogue. "Lorde summer is when you break your cell phone and you don't care. It's meeting a hot guy and then never talking to him again."

Maybe Lorde Summer is exactly what we need in 2025: a coming of age that doesn't feel like arriving, but like letting go of an idea of who you should become. A reminder that we can be everything at once: Still chaotic, non-conformist, searching. But in cool.

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