Virgin album review: Lorde continues daring to be different on what’s far from a retread
Across her career, the chart-topping NZ pop star has issued work ranging from buzzing electronic minimalism to 90s dance piano and beachy acoustic guitars; here, she surprises once again.
Album reviews for week of July 5 2025:
POP
Virgin
Lorde
Universal
Lorde’s personal life has become a steady tabloid fixture since she first hit the big time at 16, and her deeply personal lyrics have long been the kind to be dissected by fan accounts and Genius web annotators alike. Perhaps the most intriguing element of Lorde’s music, however, is that her voice – immediately distinctive, often multi-tracked and outwardly emotive – is a singular constant against what has now become a constantly changing set of variables. Across the past 12 years, work issued by the New Zealand artist born Ella Yelich-O’Connor has ranged from buzzing electronic minimalism (Royals) to stabs of 90s dance piano (Green Light) to beachy acoustic guitars (Solar Power). On fourth album, Virgin, there’s yet another pivot – thanks, in part, to collaborating with first-time producer Jim E-Stack. The album’s palette blends icy darkwave and neon-tinged electro-pop. To put it in terms of Lorde’s synaesthesia, it’s somewhere between the blue shades of Madonna’s Ray Of Light and the lime-green of Charli XCX’s Brat. Opening number, Hammer, revels in tension and release, immediately drawing you into Lorde’s new-found musical environment, while track two – lead single, What Was That, feels like her own soundtracking of Trainspotting’s iconic rave scene in lieu of Underworld’s Born Slippy.
It’s a hell of a one-two punch – albeit one that, admittedly, Virgin largely fails to live up to the overwhelming promise of. Man of the Year is the first sign that not everything thrown at the wall is going to stick: its big-beat drums and red-level synths sound like someone has tried doing an amateur mash-up with a deep-cut Lorde ballad and Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails. GRWM, too, is offset by the chemical imbalance of E-Stack going way too heavy-handed on wobbling sub-bass for a Lorde performance that doesn’t carry even an eighth of the required gravitas. Rest assured, Goldilocks does eventually find porridge that’s just right in the form of album centrepiece, Current Affairs. Underneath a classic Lorde confessional, delivered in vintage understated fashion befitting of 2013’s classic Pure Heroine, an electric guitar rings out a steady single note that’s complemented by subtle waves of late-night synth and chopped-and-screwed vocal samples from Dexta Dap’s Morning Love. Yes, Lorde has returned to the world of largely electronic arrangements on Virgin, but it’s decidedly not a retread. Even when the album offers less than stellar results, her efforts to experiment and adapt are still present. She’s always dared to be different, so why stop now?
David James Young
ALTERNATIVE
Sable, Fable
Bon Iver
Jagjaguwar
Few artists in the past 20 years have been so strictly defined by their foundation story as Bon Iver. In 2006, Justin Vernon retreated to an isolated cabin in frigid Wisconsin. Reeling from heartbreak, he pulled together the anguished, beautiful debut album For Emma, Forever Ago. The image of Vernon as a “sad, bruised boy” followed him through his next three records, but with album No. 5 Vernon had time to pause and reflect. The EP Sable, released at the end of 2024, details some of his experiences during the Covid pandemic, as Vernon reckoned with ill health and depression. Sable will endear itself to fans of the metallic sparseness of For Emma, and it serves as a brilliant prologue to Fable, which throws open the windows to the light and sheds indie folk for warm R&B. Everything is Peaceful Love is the uplifting centrepiece of the record, with Vernon marrying soft soul, alt-country, and electronic. Danielle Haim appears on highlight If Only I Could Wait, while There’s a Rhythmn ponders leaving the snow behind for a land of palm and gold. Bon Iver may not have been renowned for joy, but Sable, Fable is full of it.
Jules LeFevre
ROCK
Life, Death and Dennis Hopper
The Waterboys
Sun
Mike Scott is not a man to do things by halves, or to repeat himself. The Waterboys’ frontman helped birth “big music” in the ‘80s with This is the Sea, then swerved into Celtic folk with Fisherman’s Blues. Album No. 16 is an hour-long, 25-track concept album about Dennis Hopper. Scott researched deeply, and it shows, as he makes the case for Hopper’s Zelig-like existence – as an actor, director and counterculture icon – being a parable for the times in which he lived. There are major cameos, including Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and Fiona Apple, but it’s mainly Scott and the band sounding like they’re having the time of their lives, adopting hipster-speak and jumping across genres while leaping between decades – cocktail jazz on Hollywood ‘55; Motown-meets-Bacharach on Andy (A Guy Like You); wide-screen rock on Hopper’s On Top (Genius). There are also five instrumentals, one for each of Hopper’s five wives. It’s a lot to take in, it can get shaggy and it bulges at the seams, but Hopper, whose life was wild, messy and ambitious, would surely say it’s a pretty cool trip, man.
Barry Divola
POP
Who Believes in Angels?
Elton John & Brandi Carlile
Island/EMI Records
This record was written and recorded from scratch in just 20 days, and it shows. The premise: cranky pop legend Elton John meets credentialed country singer Brandi Carlile, confessed lifelong fan of the now-retired diva, for an album of duets and shared leads. Add gun producer Andrew Watt (Stones, Iggy Pop) and an oddly generic-sounding band: bassist Pino Palladino, former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, and RHCP drummer Chad Smith. The songs (music by John and Watt, with lyrics by Carlile and John’s writing partner of 58 years, Bernie Taupin) are suitably epic, if overproduced, though the music is oddly retro, much like John’s 1970s records. The project kicks off promisingly with tributes to LGBTQ standard-bearers Laura Nyro and Little Richard, but winds up a rote exercise in Elton-by-numbers. The outlier is Someone To Belong To, buoyed by a rare original melody, though it all ends in tears with the closer, When This Old World is Done With Me, a maudlin, Taupin-penned “eulogy” for his lifetime collaborator. “Release me like an ocean wave and return me to the tide,” John sings in what is his finest vocal performance on the record. Reportedly, he was overcome with emotion after completing the take. Death, even when faked, can do that.
Phil Stafford
WORLD/FOLK
Snow Flower
Tenzin Choegyal
Rainbow Valley Records/Warner
A somewhat unlikely collaboration spawns here what is, quite simply, a stunning album – a low and slow yet light and nimble exploration of east-meets-west resulting in a deeply profound, unique and textured collection of songs imbued with a meditative quality. It leaves one almost breathless, slightly disoriented, like awakening from a dream you can’t quite remember. Grammy-nominated Tibetan singer and composer Tenzin Choegyal and his dranyen (Tibetan lute) spearhead Snow Flower, while assisted ably by multi-instrumentalists Matt Corby (moog and harmonies) and Rohin Jones (The Middle East, guitars), along with songwriter Alex Henriksson. Together they craft a sonic soundscape that undulates with little speed but great power, all sung in language aside from closer Dreaming, in which Choegyal slowly and deeply recites, in English, passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The centrepiece is the sprawling, 12-minute epic Passage, which slowly builds and comes alive, pulsing as it does so with each added layer, higher harmonies over low droning vocals over the continuous buzz of sound, creating an otherworldly feeling. This is the effect Snow Flower bestows: that of “something” amid a sea of “nothing”.
Samuel J. Fell
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