“Some Days I’m a Woman, Some Days I’m a Man”: Lorde’s Virgin and the Sound of Becoming
Read at https://www.enbymeaning.com/read/lorde-virgin-album-review-2025
Released on June 27, 2025, Virgin finds Lorde shedding artifice and confronting herself in ways we’ve never seen before. This fourth studio album, her first in four years (a cyclical period for her), since the sun-drenched Solar Power, marks a dramatic return to emotional intensity. But Virgin isn’t just a sonic shift. It’s a raw, genre-defying exploration of identity, shame, intimacy, and gender. While Lorde continues to identify as a cis woman, she blurs boundaries throughout the album, embracing fluidity in a way that resonates with gender-diverse listeners.
Already, Virgin is being hailed by fans and critics alike as her most daring and vulnerable work to date. From major music publications like Rolling Stone to Reddit threads and queer Tumblr circles, the consensus is emerging: this is a cultural statement.
A New Era of Vulnerability and Honesty in Pop
From the outset, Lorde made it clear: Virgin would be different. Describing the album as “100% written in blood,” she signalled a visceral shift in her artistry as a raw, unfiltered reckoning with the self. This isn’t just a sonic evolution from 2021’s Solar Power; it’s an emotional one. The breezy, sun-soaked haze of that era has burned off. In its place is something bare, unsettling, and strikingly human.
On Virgin, Lorde dismantles the polished pop narrative and leans fully into discomfort. The album’s cover, an X-ray of her pelvis, is more than aesthetic. It’s a declaration of vulnerability, a literal look beneath the surface. In her pre-release newsletter, she spoke of striving for “FULL TRANSPARENCY… I was trying to see myself, all the way through,” and wanting to reflect a version of femininity that is “raw, primal, innocent, elegant, openhearted, spiritual, masc.” That rare inclusion of “masc” alongside traditionally feminine traits isn’t a throwaway; it hints at the fluidity and self-examination that define this record.
Lorde confessed she was “scared” to release something so nakedly honest, yet also “proud.” And rightly so. Because Virgin doesn’t just dip into vulnerability, but instead dives headfirst, shedding any protective irony or metaphor. The result? A project that’s part emotional bloodletting, part spiritual exorcism, and deeply resonant for listeners navigating identity, gender, and selfhood.
That intensity is immediately felt. From the very first listen, Virgin stuns with its lyrical openness. One of the album’s most talked-about lines, “You tasted my underwear”, arrives early, disarming and unforgettable. Lorde herself joked she’d “never heard that in a song before”. But moments like this aren’t played for shock value. They reflect a larger commitment to truth-telling, even when it’s messy, awkward, or deeply intimate.
As critics have noted, even at her most acclaimed (Melodrama, Pure Heroine), Lorde has always maintained a certain distance like a narrator observing the chaos from a poetic remove. Not so here. On Virgin, that final veil is lifted. The songs read like journal entries scrawled in the middle of the night: visceral, unedited, brimming with contradiction.
And that honesty is what makes Virgin hit so hard. It’s not a perfect album, and it’s not trying to be. Instead, it’s a record about trying to find yourself and realising there’s no clean version of that process. For queer, trans, and nonbinary listeners in particular who are often asked to justify or explain our fluidity to sanitise selfhood feels both radical and familiar.
By choosing truth over polish, Virgin becomes more than an album. It’s a mirror—a messy, reflective, beautiful one.
Sonically Stripped-Back Yet Boldly Experimental
If Virgin marks a lyrical unravelling, its sonic palette mirrors that same vulnerability. Lorde’s fourth studio album sounds like she ripped the gloss off her records and leaned fully into imperfection, and in doing so, she’s crafted one of her most daring sonic statements yet.
Musically, Virgin feels at once familiar and jarringly fresh. It reunites with the sharp-edged alt-pop DNA of Pure Heroine and Melodrama, but this time, there’s a coarser, more abrasive twist. Lorde trades long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff for electronic producer Jim-E Stack, and the result is a sound world built on percussion-driven beats, eerie textures, and off-kilter experimental flourishes.
Rather than smoothing things over, the production on Virgin embraces distortion and tension. Synths screech, vocals are twisted into “incomprehensible, mangled” fragments, and ambient echoes sweep through tracks like emotional drafts. The album is rough, a perfect match for the record’s themes of bodily discomfort, gender dissonance, and emotional exposure.
Gone is the lush, sunlit warmth of Solar Power (also deserving of its flowers). In its place is something colder, darker, and more confrontational. And yet, Lorde doesn’t abandon melody. Beneath the rawness lies a steady pulse: big choruses, bold hooks, and cathartic build-ups are still very much present. Even its most delicate moments often explode your body into movement. Tracks like the opener, “Hammer,” and lead single, “What Was That,” are prime examples, skittering with dance floor beats but undercut by lyrical anxiety.
A no-skip album that flows with almost terrifying cohesion. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, it’s a tight, deliberate, and unified piece of work. Nothing feels tacked on or overworked. Lorde isn’t aiming for perfection; she’s aiming for truth, and the music reflects that.
Still, not everyone is sold. Some listeners, especially on first spin, have found the unconventional song structures and lo-fi edges off-putting. Some tracks build with hypnotic intensity, only to end abruptly, refusing the expected climax. A few Reddit users admitted they were left wanting more:
“A lot of the songs feel like they're building to something really special and then just fizzle out.”
— Longjumping_Cat2069, r/popheads
Others felt the minimalism occasionally veered into “pretty mid” territory, claiming the melodies lacked the instant punch of Melodrama’s finest moments.
I must admit that I, too, feel tormented by the series of albums released in the music industry today that clock in at only half an hour, as if they were EPs. The sector has fallen into the habit of TikTokifying songs and albums so that they can go viral or be played on repeat, thereby increasing streams. It is frustrating, and the gays do not ever want to feel as if they are left wanting more.
That being said, I would rather have a concise and unified piece of work than unnecessary filler content placed solely to be skipped or listened to independently. I want an album that I can listen to from Track 1 to Track 10 and feel the seamlessness, resonate with the story, and understand the cohesion. Albums were meant to be whole, not compilations.
Ultimately, Virgin isn’t trying to please everyone. It’s an immersive listen that's meant to be consumed as a whole, not in fragments. There are no “Royals”-style instant smashes or “Green Light” euphorias here. But that’s part of its power.
This is an album that reveals itself slowly, not with fireworks, but with friction. And in a pop landscape increasingly driven by algorithm-friendly hits, Virgin stands out by doing the exact opposite: it demands attention, patience, and presence.
Embracing Fluid Identity: “Some Days I’m a Woman, Some Days I’m a Man”
Where Virgin truly transcends the standard pop album is in its bold thematic exploration of gender fluidity and selfhood. Lorde doesn’t just sing about personal growth, she questions the very architecture of identity. In doing so, she’s created a body of work that speaks directly to gender-diverse listeners who rarely see themselves reflected in mainstream pop from a cis artist.
On the standout track “Hammer”, she delivers one of the most resonant lines of her career:
“Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.”
Delivered without fanfare, it lands like a quiet revolution, a lyric that feels both intimate and seismic. Longtime fans recognised the phrase from a 2023 Instagram story, where Lorde captioned an androgynous selfie with the exact same words. At the time, it sparked speculation about her gender identity. But on Virgin, she finally addresses it not through commentary, but through song.
Importantly, Lorde hasn’t come out as nonbinary. She still uses she/her pronouns and describes herself, in her own words, as “a woman — except on the days when I’m a man.” It’s a paradox that resists classification. Rather than adopting a label, Lorde leans into the ambiguity, the expansiveness. “My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,” she reflected in an interview — and Virgin is what bloomed in that space.
Behind the music, her process was just as fluid and embodied. She describes slipping on a pair of men’s jeans and feeling a spark of recognition in their shape and fit. Later, while writing the track “Man of the Year,” she physically taped her chest down with duct tape, attempting to inhabit a more masculine posture. She looked in the mirror and was both startled and awakened:
“It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me… There was this violence to it.”
Moments like these were transformed into music. And that’s what makes Virgin so resonant: it doesn’t just talk about identity, it embodies it.
Even the album’s title, Virgin, holds layered meaning. On one level, it refers to a kind of renewal, Lorde has publicly shared that going off hormonal birth control for the first time since age 15 left her feeling “reset,” almost like she was beginning again in her own body. But the word goes deeper. In a newsletter and later an Instagram story, she unpacked its mythological roots:
In ancient usage, “virgin” didn’t mean sexually inexperienced, it meant “whole unto oneself,” independent and unattached. Some definitions even refer to a “man-woman or androgynous being” containing the full potential of a complete human.
That symbolism electrified Lorde. For her, Virgin became not just a metaphor for bodily autonomy, but for reclaiming selfhood, not in binaries, but in wholeness. She’s not playing with gender as aesthetic; she’s confronting it as a structure that has shaped, limited, and now released her.
Across the album, this thread of gender-fluid rebirth interweaves with other core themes: bodily autonomy, generational trauma, and emotional inheritance. In “Broken Glass,” she candidly references her past eating disorder. In “Current Affairs,” she combines romantic disillusionment with physical vulnerability in a lyric as raw as it is unforgettable:
“You tasted my underwear / I knew we were fucked.”
And in “Favourite Daughter,” she traces her relationship with her mother, dissecting the roles women are taught to play and the pain they quietly carry. These aren’t just personal stories, they're cultural commentaries, tied to the expectations of gender and performance.
And still, despite all this heavy introspection, Lorde doesn’t claim to have it figured out. In “Hammer”, she concedes:
“I’m ready to feel that I don’t have the answers.”
That open-endedness feels central to the entire Virgin era. It’s an album not of conclusions, but of becoming. It invites listeners to see identity not as something you arrive at, but something you live inside of, day by day.
Lorde isn’t rejecting femininity. She’s expanding it. And in doing so, she’s made a pop album that doesn’t just nod to queer experiences, it feels queer in its form, its themes, and its fearless messiness.
Pop Culture Impact: A Mainstream Star Blurring Boundaries
With Virgin, Lorde has sparked a cultural conversation that stretches far beyond a typical album cycle. In a pop industry where women are often expected to stay within familiar archetypes, the heartbreak queen, the fashion icon, the marketable muse, Lorde’s public embrace of gender fluidity and self-reclamation feels radical. And more importantly, it feels real.
Comparisons have been made to past gender-bending moments in pop, like Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy” and Lady Gaga’s alter ego Jo Calderone. But Virgin is different. This isn’t a one-off concept song or a character cosplay. Lorde has infused the entire era, from lyrics to visuals to interviews, with the lived reality of fluid identity. She’s not putting on masculinity as a costume; she’s embodying gender expansiveness as part of who she is.
And she’s doing it without spectacle or declaration. Unlike many stars who "come out" with highly choreographed statements, Lorde avoids tokenism. She hasn’t labelled herself, nor claimed a space she doesn’t feel belongs to her. She’s treating gender as personal and evolving. That nuance has struck a chord with queer listeners, particularly those who feel boxed in by binaries or overwhelmed by the pressure to define themselves. Lorde's stance is clear: this is her truth, not a press release.
The media’s response has been telling. Queer publications and progressive critics have largely praised her vulnerability and fluidity. But elsewhere, the reaction has been more polarised. Some conservative and mainstream outlets dismissed her commentary as “woke” or accused her of attention-seeking. That alone underscores Lorde’s cultural weight: a single quote from a newsletter can ignite a global gender discourse.
And that discourse matters. Even if some responses are ignorant or mocking, the visibility of gender fluidity in the mainstream is a major cultural shift. It tells us that the binary is no longer the default in pop and that audiences are hungry for artists who speak to the messier, more complex realities of identity.
Artistic Influence: Could Virgin Signal a New Pop Direction?
Musically, Virgin could quietly reshape the pop landscape. In a streaming era dominated by TikTok baits and 2010s nostalgia, Lorde took a sharp left turn by delivering a stripped-back, emotionally raw, genre-defying album with no intention of chasing the charts. And yet, Virgin is still connecting. Its lead single “What Was That” debuted at #1 on Spotify US, which is a promising sign that authenticity doesn’t have to come at the cost of reach.
If Virgin succeeds commercially, it may give other artists permission to prioritise vulnerability over virality. Lorde’s willingness to be imperfect and to leave in the messy lines, the offbeat structures, the non-radio-friendly emotions is a quiet act of rebellion. She’s proving that pop doesn’t need polish to resonate.
Reclaiming "Virgin": A Feminist Statement
Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the feminist resonance of the album’s title. By reclaiming the word “virgin”, Lorde challenges the patriarchal baggage that has long defined it. She reframes it not as a mark of sexual inexperience, but as a symbol of autonomy, rebirth, and wholeness. In Lorde’s version, a “virgin” is not defined by men but by the act of returning to oneself.
It’s a move that echoes her debut-era critiques of materialism and image (“Royals”), but with the maturity of someone who’s lived through the industry’s expectations and found her own language to push back. The think-pieces are already rolling out. TikTok users are making explainer videos about ancient virgin goddesses. And fans are discussing how Virgin gives us a new cultural lens for understanding gender, power, and self-definition.
Just as Pure Heroine reshaped what teenage rebellion sounded like, Melodrama redefined heartbreak in technicolour, and Solar Power laid the groundwork for introspection and quiet healing, Virgin offers a blueprint for what it means to grow up, break down, and begin again on your own terms.
Final Thoughts: Virgin as a Love Letter to the Self
In the end, Virgin isn’t just an album; it’s a reckoning. A ritual. A release. It feels like witnessing an artist turn herself inside out, shedding ego and expectation in real time, and by doing so, offering the rest of us permission to do the same.
As a long-time fan, I found Virgin to be affirming, emotional, and liberating. It’s the sound of someone choosing to love herself enough to show every scar, contradiction, and fear, and still sing through it. Lorde approaches the good, the bad, and the ugly with an honesty we rarely get from artists of her stature. And this time, she’s doing it with something she admits she long withheld: compassion.
In her own words: “I’d tried treating myself like s**t… turns out, compassion is the answer.”
That ethos pulses through Virgin. Even in the tracks filled with shame, confusion, or grief, there’s a current of self-forgiveness, a belief that truth-telling, no matter how messy, is a path to freedom.
For enby, trans, and queer folks listening, this album hits even deeper. Virgin is a reminder that our journeys aren’t linear, and they don’t need to be legible to anyone but ourselves. Lorde doesn’t tie her story into a bow. She revels in the ambiguity, in the moments of “I don’t know,” and makes it sound like freedom. In a world that still demands clarity and cohesion from queer lives, her embrace of the in-between is quietly revolutionary.
By the time the final track fades out, her voice trailing off with “tell them…” — it’s clear: Lorde has been reborn. Not as a new persona, but as herself, finally unfiltered. On her own terms.
Virgin is an album to love, to ponder, to cry to, and to grow with. It critiques the pop machine while honouring the queer truth that we contain multitudes. In an industry that still demands one brand, one sound, one self, Lorde just handed us a blueprint for being everything at once.
And for that, Virgin has not just earned its flowers,
it planted the whole garden.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½ (4.5/5 stars)
Album: Virgin by Lorde (2025).
Virgin isn’t just an artistic shift; it’s a visceral, soul-exposing body of work that invites listeners into the unfiltered becoming of an artist and a person. It’s not polished pop; it’s pop that bleeds. While not every risk lands cleanly, Lorde's willingness to get messy makes this her most resonant project yet. A slow-burning, queer-coded reckoning for anyone who’s ever been in flux.
Fave Tracks: Hammer, Shapeshifter, Man of the Year, Favourite Daughter, Broken Glass, David
Best For: Lying on the floor in a towel post-shower, spiralling gently, texting no one back, and wondering who the hell you’re becoming
Queer Core Takeaway: Gender is expansive. Identity is nonlinear. And sometimes, the most radical thing is to be real without apologising. Virgin reminds us that you don’t need to be legible to be whole.
Want more queer pop culture breakdowns, honest reviews, and media moments that hit like a journal entry at 2am? Subscribe to Enby Meaning for weekly drops you’ll actually feel. Check out some of our other recent Album Reviews, like:
Bops, Body, and Belonging: Addison Rae’s Pop Debut Speaks to the Girls, Gays, and Theys
