On her new album, Lorde creates pop at its purest – performative, playful and alive to paradox

“✏️Describe the vibe” goes the demand to commenters underneath the YouTube video for Lorde’s latest single, “Hammer”. Fans form a flow; a “vibe check” in Zillenial parlance:

The pure rawness … (@lynmariegm)

A more raw true-to-self form … (@m3lodr4matic)

This is pure art … (@anishm-g1r)

Lorde’s 2013 debut album was titled Pure Heroine. But, she tells us – and fans and critics agree – Virgin is the first album which “does not lie”. Pure pop. Not lying is not necessarily synonymous with truth, however. Rather, not lying in the present cultural moment is more akin to the careful articulation of a whole vibe.

For women in particular, truth, authenticity – dare I say realness – mean modulating their feelings, but also a particular calibration and presentation of their bodies in media.

Such a balancing act is captured in that YouTube imperative which moves between the pencil (“✏️”) – the demand to describe – and the “vibe”, the very thing we often find too hard to write down or put into words.

Pop music is often at the nexus of these two seemingly opposite moves. Think about going to a gig and afterwards being asked “how was it?”, and all you can say is “you had to be there”.

Of course it is not so simple. We are always putting our feeling into words – describing all manner of bodily responses. Lorde herself sings in “Broken Glass” about how her eating disordered body was marked by language: the “arithmetic” of calorie counting. Elsewhere, she lists other social signifiers in which she is enmeshed: daughter (“Favourite Daughter”), siren, saint (“Shapeshifter”).

Words and the body

Nonetheless, the repeated theme in press interviews is that Virgin moves beyond language, towards a pure woman’s body, free of the mark of sexuality. At the same time, the album is also “ravenously horny” according to one review. She is both as pure as a newborn (a “Virgin”), but marked by her sexuality.

The song “Current Affairs” most clearly demonstrates proximity between the sexed body and its description in lyrics. Lorde collapses into her lover’s body (“He spit in my mouth”). But when he breaks her heart, she cannot put into language the hurt. Rather she blames her anguish on the news: “current affairs”.

Pop music and pop culture thrives off the market exchange and saleability of sex, particularly young women’s sex. When I first wrote about Lorde 11 years ago, I pitted her against Miley Cyrus, noting the outrage at Miley’s “growing up” (from Hannah Montana to adulthood), which mapped onto her perceived new working class, tasteless identity.

Against the crass vulgarity of Miley, I argued then, we had the middle-class intellectualism of Lorde. The argument stands. Virgin certainly adds a heightened sexiness to Lorde, but it is far from crude. She is branded, not just by the market (the cost of tour tickets and merchandise), but also by her identity as a tasteful and hip woman.

More fleshy (“wide hips/soft lips” she sings in “GRWM”) than the teen “Royal” of 2012, but still on Universal Music Group’s repertoire and still circulated as an “alt” option for pop fans.

We can also think of Lorde’s collaboration with her current working class alter, and last year’s popstar commodity, Charli XCX. In Lorde’s verse in “Girl, so confusing” she notes Charli is, essentially, a “Chav” – “still a young girl from Essex”. But in the same verse, Lorde shows her awareness of both women’s function on the market:

People say we’re alike

They say we’ve got the same hair

It’s you and me on the coin

The industry loves to spend

This knowing wink to how women move within the pop-culture marketplace produces a different kind of purity, one based on an intimacy between the popstar and her listeners. We all know Lorde’s difference from Charli is about image: the “poet” versus the party girl.

Intimacy as purity is part of what cultural theorist Anna Kornbluh recently dubbed the pressure of “immediacy”, characterised by an apparently ceaseless flow and demand to constantly share images and video of our bodies, afforded by the scroll of social media.

While the depiction of our bodies and selves on screens is fundamental to this moment, according to Kornbluh, we contradictorily lose sight of this screening. Feeling as though we are #NoFilter – present and real. Key to this is the exhibition of our feelings and emotions.

For all women, but particularly those in the public eye, the sharing of these feelings materialise into “coin”. Vulnerability, pleasure, all-the-feels-all-the-time – especially for women – make “bank”.

Intimacy and knowingness

Vulnerability has been a catch-cry in media characterisations of Virgin. Critics and fans equate Lorde’s lyrical confessions and press tour patter with a market-valuable “purity”, equated with immediate access (to quote the YouTube fan above) to a “true-to-self” Lorde.

One of her more amusing (but fitting) press engagements was on Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast. On the couch, we hear Lorde, wearing a Yohji Yamamoto blazer, musing about vulnerability, gender and her mother – with the great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud.

While the Charli XCX track shows Lorde’s intimacy through her knowingness about her role as “coin” for the music industry, the music videos from Virgin offer a more embodied intimacy. The clip for the album’s first single, “What Was That?”, features an extreme closeup inside her mouth. The album cover itself is an X-ray showing her hips and her IUD.

Kornbluh suggests this emphasis on often literal bodily interiors – people’s “insides” – produces an ersatz sense of closeness and sociality, as our relationships become more and more beholden to the alienating circuits of “social” media.

Virgin does not lie. It traces a truth of our times – a paradoxical truth – that we are at our most intimate, our most pure, when we are unmediated, all the while bearing out the imperative to “✏️Describe the vibe” – to mediate and expose ourselves onscreen.

My own vibe check? I love the album. It is pop at its purest – performative, playful and certainly worth paying attention to.