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Lorde is gearing up for the release of Virgin, her long-awaited fourth album, and she’s opened up about the intense, cathartic personal journey that came along with it — including expanding her gender identity.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Lorde detailed the period in between the release of her 2021 album Solar Power and making Virgin throughout 2023 and 2024. Major changes in her life, including a significant breakup, receiving psychedelic therapy, and coming face-to-face with an eating disorder, allowed Lorde to examine her own gender identity: “My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,” she said.
Indeed, gender is one of Virgin‘s primary explorations. Lorde revealed that a lyric on the album’s opening track says “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man,” and she’s been deeply examining the knotty relationships between femininity, masculinity, pregnancy, and the beauty and grotesqueness of our bodies. When asked if she identifies as non-binary, Lorde referenced a recent conversation she had with Chappell Roan, whom she calls a good friend of hers: “She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
It’s not the first time she’s alluded to her new era having more gender ambiguity; for one, fans have noticed Lorde dressing in more traditionally masculine looks throughout the last year (which could be because fashion overall is becoming less and less gendered, but that’s another article for another time). But she also discussed her thoughts on identity and her body in a recent interview with Document Journal, saying, “I had come back from London to New York after this period of great turbulence in my personal life… Becoming single, but also really facing my body stuff head-on, and starting to feel my gender broadening a little bit.”
Meanwhile, exploring a more masc persona was certainly on the mood board for Virgin. In a statement provided to Billboard about the cover art of Virgin, Lorde wrote (in all caps): “WAS TRYING TO MAKE A DOCUMENT THAT REFLECTED MY FEMININITY: RAW, PRIMAL, INNOCENT, ELEGANT, OPENHEARTED, SPIRITUAL, MASC.” She’s also referenced playing with various expressions of gender in her frequent newsletter emails to her fans, at one point writing that she’s been looking to “Incorporate the grotesque, the masc, the statuesque, the jacked, the magnificent” into her art.
Still, despite the experimenting with gender, Lorde continues to call herself a cis woman and has not changed her pronouns, describing herself as “in the middle gender-wise.” “I don’t think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,” she said in the Rolling Stone interview. “I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated. Making the expression privately is one thing, but I want to make very clear that I’m not trying to take any space from anyone who has more on the line than me. Because I’m, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”
As alluded to in her recent return single “What Was That” as well as her turn on Charli XCX’s rework of “Girl, so confusing,” Lorde had also been working through an eating disorder that plagued her for years. “I felt so hungry and so weak,” she said. “It was just this sucking of a life force or something.”
The roots of her eating disorder came from stage fright, which Lorde had been dealing with since childhood. Once she tried MDMA and psilocybin therapy, the eye-opening psychedelic experiences helped Lorde liberate her body and mind and changed her relationship to her own songs. “I was touring without stage fright for the first time,” she said, “I would play ‘Supercut’ and all of a sudden there was a hook around my guts and everyone in the room was having the same feeling, [like] there’d been a huge pressure change. It made me realize how much I love and kind of need that very deep, visceral response to feel my music.”
Though the therapy made a massive impact on her, she still found herself obsessing over controlling her weight. “I don’t know how those two things can be true: that I’m having this really amazing, rich experience of playing the shows and meeting these kids, and [yet] I’m also looking at the pictures afterward and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy, thinking it was so unforgivable what I had allowed it to become.”
Eventually, upon moving to New York to work on Virgin, she came face-to-face with the reality of her eating disorder, that it was a self-imposed way of forcing herself to be small. Breaking through that wall and letting herself take up more space — physically and emotionally — is what led to the “raw, rugged” tone that characterizes Virgin.
Elsewhere in Lorde’s Rolling Stone interview, she discusses the end of a long-term relationship that fueled “What Was That,” how the remix to Charli XCX’s “Girl, so confusing” came along (“Unbeknownst to [Charli], I was slamming into rock bottom on multiple levels”), how birth control, nudity, and “regulated femininity” inspired Virgin, revisiting toxic ideas about womanhood from her youth, working with producer Jim E-Stack, and what led to the physical, vulnerable tenor of her new album. Read the interview here.
Lorde’s Virgin arrives on June 27th. She’s supporting the album with a massive 2025 tour, with the general ticket sale kicking off on Friday May 16th. Get tickets to see Lorde here. Plus, check out our track review of lead single “What Was That,” and pre-order your copy of Virgin here.
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