Lorde is a marketing genius and Virgin is her best album yet - Varsha Anjali

Lorde performing on the Woodsies Stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset. Photo / Getty Images

It was 11.30am BST when New Zealand’s biggest indie pop star appeared at a secret set on the third day of the Glastonbury Festival in England on Friday.

This was Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s, or Lorde as the world knows her, first performance since dropping her new album Virgin that morning. The set was so secret that there wasn’t any inkling of it until an hour or two before the show. Like every promo move she’s made with the new album, she detonated.

Graced in bone on the Woodsies stage - white t-shirt, white pants and a white bra - the 28-year-old livestreamed to thousands on social media. She opened with Hammer, followed by the rest of the record in a front-to-back performance, adding Ribs and Greenlight from previous albums towards the end.

A page from the Virgin vinyl insert.

Halfway through the set, she confessed to the massive crowd that the record took her “a lot”.

“I didn’t know if I’d make another record to be honest, but I am back here, completely free.”

On Saturday morning, the Auckland native shared her post-Glastonbury feels on her Instagram Story, saying she was “very moved and overwhelmed” during her performance. Shortly afterwards, she posted on her grid:

“I tried to love Virgin right the way through these stages at the same time as I was learning to love myself in my many stages of change, growth, brokenness and wholeness.

“This album broke me apart and forged a new creature out of me,” she added.

Fans have been waiting patiently and holding faith in their Lorde since the release of her last album, Solar Power, four years ago. That album was okay, but nothing compared to Pure Heroine (2013) and Melodrama (2017), both of which felt like they were ahead of their time.

Virgin doesn’t disappoint. It is not only Lorde’s best album yet - it may just be up for Album of the Year. Shapeshifter is icy raw with rapidly moving textures that make it an edgy, transformative, emotional masterpiece. The music video for Hammer is wild and intimate, and in my opinion, the best video she’s made. It’s a perfect climax for a cleverly constructed, astral crescendo to Lorde’s new era.

However, Virgin antics have also been causing outrage online. On Friday, my feed all day on X was various memes of people holding aghast expressions, with fresh discussions on what a woman shouldn’t do with her own body and versions of the sentence, “Lorde’s got her whole vagina out”. Except she hadn’t.

This is what I noticed when I pulled out Virgin’s vinyl (blood variant) insert: A photo of presumably the Kiwi indie pop star’s body. You don’t see a face. You do see a waist and thighs in clear plastic pants (I thought of JYP in the 90s). Centred in the frame is what the internet is calling “Lordeussy”. But Lordeussey isn’t a vagina. It is only mons pubis with some pubic hair.

The photo was genius. And it made sense, even though it was unexpected. But unexpected because bare flesh, particularly a woman’s flesh, is still stigmatised. Not because it was contrarian to who she is. No one thought that. Everyone agreed it matched her vibe.

The artist has been foreshadowing Lordeussey, or a pivotal shift in the artist’s career, for some time. From the album name and the pelvic x-ray album cover art, to her WhatsApp messages to fans (“I think it’s time for full transparency” was one sent on Monday), Lorde has been dropping coded messages seeped in provocative rawness, rebirth, newness, deep intimacy and deep vulnerability that come with no surprise. And we’re grateful for it.