Lorde, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down
A look through what should have been a revival
By Jenny Sequoia
Remember Virgin? Not you, the album by Lorde. It didn’t really do a lot for me. It’s somewhere between mediocre and kinda good. It seems like the result of throwing all of Lorde’s current output into a Q-learning machine and weighting Solar Power WAY more than you ought to. All that to say, the music itself didn’t captivate me in any meaningful way. It left me thinking about what exactly an artist is supposed to do after a masterpiece.
If you look through the history of music, the majority of groups simply implode post-epiphany. Both of the Beatles’ masterpieces signaled the end of something within the band. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was their final fully original LP to be released before their extremely homoerotic, infamous India trip, and Abbey Road was forcefully squeezed out of their final recording sessions before their messy yet wildly entertaining dissolution. Granted, the mythological aspects of A SURREALIST, CONCEPTUAL MASTERPIECE or THE FINAL ALBUM FROM THE FUCKING BEATLES seem to occupy the casual consciousness and arguably play a very large role in their constant veneration, but the parallels are still there, and those are actually pretty great albums. Either way, the band makes a good thing, then the band implodes.
There are some extremely rare cases that see an artist release a masterpiece and somehow continue that quality for another release or two. Kendrick Lamar’s run of Good Kid, m.A.A.d City into To Pimp a Butterfly comes to mind, along with Black Country, New Road’s current span of releases. This is pretty uncommon and usually only happens to those immensely talented, once-in-a-generation artists. No, Swans are not part of this category; let’s not kid ourselves.
As interesting as these cases are, the reality is that the artist in question will stumble and sputter out with a whimper far more often than they will be subject to a tragic, triumphant, or generally splendorous display. The reality of art is that it’s ridiculously difficult to maintain a relatively high standard of quality, let alone one that could be considered masterful or virtuosic. This line of thought, unfortunately, brings us back to Lorde.
It seems Lorde is at an awkward point in her career in which she can’t quite live up to her alt-pop classic Pure Heroine or her radiant, melancholic Melodrama; instead, she exists in a grey area that you can’t interestingly criticize or praise. Her career-long teeth motif is present, but not implemented in any innovative ways. She retains most of her lyrical depth and introspective ability, but the instrumentals are shallow and empty, failing to properly complement her writing. It can be emotionally powerful, but it’s not an album with any evident staying power past the initial buzz of release. All that can really be said is that Virgin is an album that was released in the calendar year 2025, and it is arguably worth a listen.
Personally, I find this caliber of release is almost more disappointing than an absolutely terrible one, like what we’ve recently been gifted by Taylor Swift. In our case, there’s no laughter or hatred—just a bland reception that is, and then is done. The most discourse you’ll get is people chattering about how Rolling Stone and NME are hack fraud review platforms that give any semi-popular album a 10. It’s a little soul-numbing. You just get to watch something die.
At the end of the day, Virgin has already seeped into the ground to be munched on by the worms. Lorde still has the creative spark, but there’s more work to be done before she recaptures the early magic. It’s a little unfortunate that this is the case, as there are really some nice moments on this album within the bedrock. There’s just nothing else to say.