Lorde Felt Her ‘Gender Broadening’ Before She Made ‘Virgin’

Seems like Lorde’s latest body of work had her thinking about her relationship with her body and gender. On the eve of her Washington Square Park pop-up, she reflected on the circumstances that led to her new single, “What Was That,” in an interview with Document Journal. “It was the first music of my rebirth that had come out of me, and I felt it start the day that we did that,” she said. “I had come back from London to New York after this period of great turbulence in my personal life. Becoming single, but also really facing my body stuff head-on, and starting to feel my gender broadening a little bit. Just being back in my house and feeling this big wave of grief. I just kept thinking, What was all of that?” According to Lorde, her last full-length release, 2021’s Solar Power, arrived at a point in her life when she felt ungrounded. “I had made my body very small, because I thought that that was what you did as a woman and a woman on display,” she recalled, adding that she knew she wasn’t going to put out another album until she was “in my body the way I know I’m supposed to be.”

Lorde, who previously told fans in a 2022 newsletter that she was growing out her unibrow “as an entry point for playing with conventions of beauty/gender/form,” said she worked on her new album, Virgin, at a time when she was “also coming into my masculinity a bit more as well.” In a recent newsletter to fans, she described her upcoming project as an attempt to “make a document that reflected my femininity: raw, primal, innocent, elegant, masc.” On May 1, she shared screenshots on her Instagram Story from a blog post by clinician and researcher Kristine Shields that state that some people believe “virgin” once meant a “one-in-herself” woman who was “not attached to a man” and thus was a term used to convey strength and independence. Another sentence that she highlighted declares, “There is also evidence that the word ‘virgin’ derived from the combination of the Latin words ‘vir-’ (for man, as in ‘virile’) and ‘-gyne’ (for woman, as in gynecology) – a man-woman or androgynous person.” How big of a role will all these ideas play when it comes to the lyrics and concept of the full track list? Until June 27, only Lorde knows.