Hey! Stop it! Leave Solar Power alone!

As the Virgin discourse unfolds, Lorde’s third album has been catching strays.

Kia ora.

On Friday morning, things kicked off looking a little bleak. With just a handful of critics given pre-release copies of Lorde’s fourth album, the reviews for Virgin trickled in slowly. The Times went early and it went hard. It was, wrote Will Hodgkinson in a paywalled two-star review, an album that “second-guessed her audience,” one made with “one eye on her Spotify numbers”. Hodgkinson didn’t stop there. “It suffers from synthetic and frankly rather annoying production,” he said. “It doesn’t hit home in the way it should.”

Thankfully, over the course of the day, cooler heads prevailed. A fuller picture emerged. The real reviews began landing, one after the other, and they told a different story. “She is transcendentally witchy, harmonising with herself both literally and spiritually, a pop star in the throes of creative rebirth,” wrote AllMusic’s Matt Collar.“Lyrically, it’s as revealing as the x-ray of her pelvis on the album’s cover,” said Variety’s Jem Aswad. “Powerful, moving, personal but universal – and packed with bangers,” quipped The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis.

Right now, Virgin has an 85% rating on Metacritic, placing it slightly below Melodrama (91) and slightly above Pure Heroine (79), which feels about right. I’ve had about four listens all the way through, and while it’s Lorde’s shortest and messiest album, it also finds her rawer and more revealing than ever. Yes, that’s her pelvis on the cover (and much more on the vinyl insert); yes, many of the lyrics capture a relationship break-up and a rebirth; and yes, ‘Clearblue,’ the album’s incredible beat-less centrepiece, is named after a pregnancy test. (Pitchfork calls that song ‘Lorde Iver’, a reference to Bon Iver’s bleeding-heart-on-sleeve resonance, saying it’s a clear Justin Vernon “homage”.)

Then, alongside the glowing reviews, another trend emerged. Solar Power, Lorde’s third album that operated as a reset from the chart-topping, festival-headlining superstardom of her first two albums, began catching strays. Many reviews repeated the same refrain: Solar Power sucked and Virgin is the true Melodrama sequel, the one fans have been waiting eight years for. “Hyperfocusing on women, weed, and weather appeared to orient the star on a path to gains in psilocybin therapy but fumbled a Lorde album’s chief assignment,” writes Vulture’s Craig Jenkins, his second stab at Solar Power after calling it “stoned and patchy” in his ‘Man of the Year’ review.

Others follow suit. Slate’s Carl Wilson calls Solar Power “subdued”, “unsettled” and “ambigious”. It was, Stereogum’s Margaret Farrell says, “jarringly out of place mid-pandemic … was this supposed to be satire or escapism?” Iowa Public Radio’s Anthony Scanga labels it “less than stellar”. “Solar Power was a weird offering that nobody really knew how to respond to. It more or less came and went.” Writing for The AP, Maria Sherman ignores Solar Power entirely. “Musically, Virgin threads the needle from Melodrama to the current moment,” she says.

I’m not having it. At the time of its release, I wrote one of the few reviews that praised Solar Power. “Lorde doesn’t care about your expectations. She isn’t interested in hearing your demands. The 24-year-old doesn’t give a flying fuck about the box you put her in,” I wrote. “You want ‘Royals’? You’ve already got it. You should probably move on too.” I stand by that review. I still love Solar Power, still smile when Robyn delivers her ridiculous in-flight instructions, and still play Lorde’s te reo remake regularly too.

Put another way, you don’t get Virgin without Solar Power. Her third album was the sound of an artist demanding a career that lasted as long as she wants, not one being dictated by the churn-and-burn of the pop music industry. Every artist with a career spanning decades has an album just like that in their canon. On its release, Adore was slated for its gloomy electronica; now, it’s considered among the best Smashing Pumpkins albums. Same with The Beastie Boys’ Paul Boutique, Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreaks, and Weezer’s Pinkerton.

Sitting here today, with the extraordinarily explicit Virgin vinyl to crack open (gaze upon the R18 photographic insert if you dare), there’s so much more to decipher. ‘Broken Glass’ shatters me more with every listen. Who is Lorde washing off her chest in ‘GRWM’? Is it the same person referred to in the lyrics - “Was I just someone to dominate? … Was I just young blood to get on tape?” - for ‘David’? Like all the best albums should, Virgin is going to take its sweet time to unpack. Solar Power, it seems, may just take a little longer than all her others.

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Bonus beat.

The Daily Mail had to do it.