Fame & therapy

Lorde's latest is extraordinary for its candour.

- BY GRAHAM REID

Anyone looking for this country's dark underbelly need only consider social media comments about Lorde's new album. Some are vile, many simply stupid ("she's a wacko"), others shameful and a few telling: “I would rather listen to my 60s music.”

From the tenor of many, a significant number of women among them, this talented, articulate 28-year-old - our most successful musical export who played an energetic set at Britain's Glastonbury last weekend - is the bile spewers' new target in the absence of former PM Jacinda Ardern.

“An ode to Dear Leader JabCinders for her contribution to the destruction of a nation,” wrote one of the disaffected about this album, not actually available at that time.

Counter to this are academic critiques forensically disassembling Lorde's lyrics, persona, feminism and interviews. Then there's that huge fan base who grew up with Lorde, rejoicing in her successes, dancing with unabashed enjoyment when she performed.

If her previous album, Solar Power (2021), was stoned solipsism mentioning discomfort with fame (something she's grappled with since her 2013 debut Pure Heroine), Lorde's Virgin is a deeper and often uncomfortably therapeutic album about personal growth and change.

"Can't believe I've become someone else, someone more like myself" (on the dramatic Man of the Year); “I become her again, visions of teenage innocence. How did I shift shape like that? (on Shapeshifter, which rides an electro beat not out of place on a