Lorde’s new album comes out today, here’s everything we know about Virgin

It’s June 27 2025, AKA the day that Lorde’s fourth album, Virgin, gets released in full.

Unless you’re one of the select few fans who got a sneak listen of the full album at one of 40 events held around the world this week, it’s a game of wait and see as to what the album as a whole says.

However, thanks to an involved promotional campaign ahead of Virgin’s release, we have a fair idea of what to expect from the release. To catch you up, here’s what we know so far.

Virgin is revealing

When the cover art was revealed on May 1, Lorde’s choice of imagery made headlines, with the album artwork showing a blue and white x-ray image of a body’s mid-section with an Intrauterine Device implanted.

This week, Lorde appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, confirming that the sacrum scan was hers. Asked what we were looking at on the cover, Lorde replied: “You’re looking at my pelvis, my jeans, my belt ... and my IUD is right there.”

“That is the most revealing and least erotic photo I’ve ever seen,” Colbert quipped.

The album cover for Lorde's fourth album, Virgin.

Announcing the album via a newsletter sent to her database, Lorde described Virgin as characterised by transparency.

“The colour of the album is clear. Like bathwater, windows, ice, spit. Full transparency,”

“The language is plain and unsentimental. The sounds are the same wherever possible.”

Lorde said she was “trying to see myself, all the way through. I was trying to make a document that reflected my femininity: raw, primal, innocent, elegant, openhearted, spiritual, masc”.

It’s also ‘feral’ and ‘feminine’

Profiling the 28-year-old for Rolling Stone, music journalist Brittany Spanos describes Virgin as “feral, wild, and physical, full of Lorde’s most from-the-gut singing ever“. The album is said to be Lorde‘s most vulnerable yet, with the 28-year-old admitting to the publication she is “terrified” to open up about the album.

“There’s going to be a lot of people who don’t think I’m a good girl any more, a good woman. It’s over,” she told Spanos.

“It will be over for a lot of people; for some people, I will have arrived. I’ll be where they always hoped I’d be.”

Appearing on the Fashion Neurosis podcast to promote Virgin, the Kiwi singer told host Bella Freud: “I do think I’ve made a distinctly kind of feminine record. I was trying to make something that was a document of my femininity in all of its grotesqueness and intensity and glory and innocence and there just is masculinity contained within that.”

In the lead-up to the full album, Lorde has released three singles that give a further indication of Virgin’s subject material.

The lead single, What Was That, was released on April 17 with the singer sharing on her website the song was penned “Late 2023. Back in New York. Deep break-up”

In the music video for Man Of The Year, the second song off Lorde's album Virgin, the Auckland singer lays herself bare on a pile of soil.

Lorde followed that with Man Of The Year, released on May 29. The song’s lyrics grapple with the singer’s evolving gender identity.

“I never really felt the presence of any gender to be honest, as a child,” Lorde told Freud. “I really do feel like a woman, I am a woman, and I think I will always be a woman, it’s just that there is this deep masculinity in me that actually enhances my womanhood.

“My femininity, there just is a strength to it that sort of shares space with masculinity.”

The singer also explores these themes in Hammer, Virgin’s opening track that sees Lorde singing “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man”.

Lorde almost arrested filming What Was That video

In April, 24 hours before What Was That was released, Lorde staged an impromptu performance of the song in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, inviting fans to meet her “in the park at 7pm”. However, moments before the rendezvous time, New York City Police shut the event down.

“We had the anti-terrorism unit being very intense and telling me if I stepped onto the premises I would be arrested for riot incitement,” she told Colbert.

A pop-up event by Lorde was shut down in New York City by police.

Lorde will tour the album in New Zealand

In May, the Auckland-born singer announced her Ultrasound world tour will follow Virgin’s release. The tour begins in Austin, Texas on September 17 and so far make 38 stops across North America and Europe.

No New Zealand or Australian dates have been announced as yet but it is widely anticipated the singer will bring the tour here. Asked at the Aotearoa Music Awards whether Ultrasound would visit her home country, the singer replied, “Have I ever missed a New Zealand tour?”

In the past Lorde struggled with live performance because of what she has termed “truly horrific stage fright” but revealed recently that therapist-prescribed MDMA and psilocybin therapy helped her overcome that barrier.

“You hold on to a response like stage fright for reasons that no amount of talk therapy or brain use could get at, when you bypass that and get to the body something shifts. That totally happened for me,” she explained on The Late Show.

“I tried everything for my stage fright, I did this therapy and I woke up the next day and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s over’.”

It’s snappy

There are 11 songs on Virgin, contributing to a total run time of 35 minutes. That’s two minutes shorter than her debut album Pure Heroine, six minutes shorter than 2017’s Melodrama and 11 minutes shorter than her last album Solar Power, released in 2021.

Virgin tracklist

We got a first look Virgin’s full track list in May When Lorde performed an impromptu show in the bathrooms of the Auckland City YMCA. Those who nabbed an invite also received a paper towel decorated with album artwork and the track list, listed below:

1. Hammer
2. What Was That
3. Shapeshifter
4. Man Of The Year
5. Favourite Daughter
6. Current Affairs
7. Clearblue
8. GRWM
9. Broken Glass
10. If She Could See Me Now
11. David