Lorde struck a glamorous figure at the 2025 Met Gala on the first Monday in May, arriving at the famous steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City wearing a custom creation by Thom Browne. Constructed of wide strips of metallic, silver-gray fabric, the high-fashion look was clearly an inventive play on a men's cummerbund — but upon first glance, did the daring, backless ensemble also resemble…duct tape?
"It's something of an Easter egg, more will be revealed," the two-time GRAMMY winner teased to Emma Chamberlain on the carpet. "To me, it really represents where I'm at gender-wise. I feel like a man and a woman, you know?"
One week later, Lorde brought up the topic of duct tape herself while showing off a few talismanic objects that helped inspire her fourth album, Virgin (out now via Republic Records and Universal Music New Zealand), to Rolling Stone. The superstar explained that she began viewing the adhesive in a new, more profound light after using it to tape up her boots, calling it "a portal into her masculinity."
Lorde's newfound gender fluidity is a core element of Virgin's DNA, from its 11 taut, polymorphic tracks to its clinical cover art, which depicts an X-ray of the singer's pelvis, complete with her intrauterine device at the center of the medical scan.
"I just felt like it was the right portrait of me to be with this album," the New Zealand native dished to BBC Radio 1 ahead of the LP's release. "It's a little bit mystical, it's super vulnerable, it's a bit tech-y. And I like that it's just the essentials: my jeans, my belt and my IUD. It was just something about it that hit for me."
Like each album that came before it, Virgin marked a conscious, intentional shift for Lorde. Working with new producers like Jim-E Stack, Dan Nigro and Buddy Ross for the first time, the singer builds a series of intricately layered soundscapes sparingly littered with touches of electronica. (That is, until a pulsing, hypnotic blast nearly threatens to overtake the album's final track, "David.") Meanwhile, her poeticism remains searing as ever and even more personal, combining the musical poetry of her earliest work with some of the philosophical musings she developed on later projects.
The result shows continued growth, self-awareness and maturity from the now 28-year-old superstar, who first captured the world's attention by turning her imaginative teenage point of view into grandiose alt-pop opuses on 2013's Pure Heroine. She then depicted the heartbreak and peak millennial confusion of growing up with 2017's Melodrama, before setting her sights on escaping via the path less traveled with 2021's Solar Power. And now, she's ruminating on sexual politics, healing from past traumas and exploring her identity like never before with Virgin.
To celebrate the new album, dive into 10 essential songs in Lorde's catalog, from groundbreaking early hits like "Royals" and "Team" to her latest potent singles "Man of the Year" and "Hammer."
As the opening track off her debut EP, The Love Club, "Bravado" serves as one of the earliest examples of Lorde's stunning skills as a teenage pop prodigy. The vulnerable, pre-Pure Heroine track gives insight into the dichotomy between Ella Yelich-O'Connor, the introverted, intensely observant girl from the suburbs of Auckland, and the bold pop persona she'd invented as Lorde.
"All my life, I've been fighting a war/ I can't talk to you or your friends/ It's not only you/ My heart jumps around when I'm alluded to, this will not do," she confesses of her insecurities on the opening verse before admitting, conversely, on the chorus, "I want the applause, the approval, the things that make me go, 'Oh!'"
"I am quite reserved in general and I'm not a very confident person," the then-16-year-old told Huffington Post about the inspiration behind "Bravado" while on her very first press tour of America in 2013. "But I knew I was about to be entering an industry where you have to be. And so ['Bravado'] was kind of my personal pep talk. Like kind of coming to a point where I could put on confidence."
"Royals" ('The Love Club'/'Pure Heroine,' 2013)
"Royals" sounded like nothing else on the radio when Lorde emerged as a bright new star in the pop firmament in 2013. Like adolescent authors S.E. Hinton and Miles Franklin before her, here was an unknown teenager from the suburbs — in this case, in New Zealand — somehow perfectly and poetically capturing exactly what it felt like to be a teenager, well, everywhere in the age of Instagram, "Blurred Lines" and Miley Cyrus' Bangerz.
In the song, a clear-eyed Lorde rejected the artifice rampant materialism blaring from her screens every day with her evocative lyricism, and even enlisted her real-life friends to appear in the accompanying music video. "But everybody's like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece/ Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash/ We don't care/ We aren't caught up in your love affair," the newly born pop star sang on the undulating hook.
"My friends and I, we've cracked the code," Lorde later intones on her debut single, not so much bragging as letting the listener in on a well-kept secret. And in reality, the teen phenom cracked the code to chart success, with the song spending nine consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and winning her both Song Of The Year and Best Pop Solo Performance at the 2014 GRAMMYs among four nominations.
Read More: 5 Ways Lorde's 'Pure Heroine' Helped Pave The Way For The Unconventional Modern Superstar
"Team" ('Pure Heroine,' 2013)
How does a teenage wunderkind build on a generation-defining No. 1 hit that both rewrote the rules of pop music success and turned her into music's next big thing? By inviting fans to venture even further into her suburban fantasy fueled by equal doses of boredom, self-mythologizing and adolescent angst.
Pure Heroine's third single, "Team," added fascinating new layers to the world she'd started building on "Royals." Conjuring up astral empires constructed brick by brick out of overlooked and forgotten "cities you'll never see on screen," Lorde perfectly encapsulated how an entire generation of millennials felt being constantly pandered to in a new millennium constantly rocked by global conflict, financial meltdown and endless appetite for consumption ("I'm kinda over gettin' told to put my hands up in the air…So there").
When Pure Heroine celebrated its 10th anniversary in September 2023, Lorde looked back on creating the LP that would change her life with a sense of loving nostalgia. As she wrote in her popular newsletter to fans, "I'd go on long walks around the neighborhood, and began to mythologise the stuff around me (big empty floodlit rugby fields/bus rides/dark streets/boredom/isolation) into the motifs that would become Pure Heroine. I wore a lot of, like, navy lipsticks from the 2 dollar shop. God, this aesthetic, It's just TOO MUCH."
"Green Light" ('Melodrama,' 2017)
When it came time to write her acclaimed sophomore album in 2017, Lorde turned her platinum pen inward. She explored her dual transitions from adolescence to young adulthood and unknown musical prodigy to global superstar in equal, fascinating measure.
Kicking off the GRAMMY-nominated Melodrama with lead single "Green Light," the singer let her heart bleed onto the page as she documented a major romantic breakup with indelible lines like, "All those rumors, they have big teeth/ Hope they bite you/ Thought you said that you would always be in love/ But you're not in love no more."
Compared to the spare alt-pop that had populated Pure Heroine, the pulsating, jittery energy of "Green Light" felt downright frenetic, and gave Lorde the permission she needed to hit the gas and zoom into the messy, confusing, heart-shattering trials of adulthood in all its glory.
"Liability" ('Melodrama,' 2017)
There's perhaps no single track more vulnerable in Lorde's entire oeuvre than "Liability." The fan-loved Melodrama album cut turns the singer's fear of rejection and hard-earned realization of the fickle, transactional nature of fame into a devastating ballad — one that can be deeply felt by anyone who's ever worried about being too intense, too loud, too emotional.
"They say, 'You're a little too much for me/ You're a liability/ You're a little too much for me'/ So they pull back, make other plans/ I understand, I'm a liability," Lorde laments, eventually concluding, "I'm a little much for…everyone."
However, what others so unkindly deem to be unworthy or unwanted can ultimately be your own saving grace, as Lorde learns by song's end; she ascends high above the fake and fair weather friends not worth her time to disappear into the blazing sun.
Lorde's artistry had always been incisive and filled with lush, hyper-specific details, but the superstar had never experimented with satire before in the way she did on Solar Power's third single, "Mood Ring."
For her sometimes polarizing 2021 album, the singer/songwriter had taken sonic inspiration from across the decades, ranging from Fleetwood Mac to TLC's strains of '90s R&B and the turn-of-the-century bubblegum pop of S Club 7. That "buzzy mix," as she described it to an Australian radio show at the time, is proudly on display on the single's floaty, harmony-laden groove.
A platinum blonde Lorde finds escapism in winking references to sun salutations, transcendental meditation, and the dual cults of wellness culture and celebrity worship. Both fans and critics were divided at the time, with some not quite understanding the color of the singer's "Mood Ring." But four years on, the satirical song — and the rest of Solar Power, for that matter — deserves its flowers for being the kind of big creative swing that requires deeper listening beyond the hot takes and instant opinions to appreciate its tongue-in-cheek message.
Multiple versions of Lorde converge in "Secrets from a Girl (Who's Seen it All)," a sweetly sentimental letter of advice the grown-up superstar penned to her younger, pre-"Royals"-era self.
The tenderly psychedelic track acts as a sort of emotional centerpiece to Solar Power, with Lorde carving out a much-deserved moment of introspection and inner calm as she imparts lessons to that wide-eyed dreamer writing songs in her bedroom back in Takapuna.
"Couldn't wait to turn fifteen/ Then you blink and it's been ten years/ Growing up a little at a time, then all at once/ Everyone wants the best for you/ But you gotta want it for yourself, my love," Lorde sings on the chorus before none other than Robyn makes a surprise, uncredited appearance on the song's amusingly philosophical spoken word bridge.
"Girl, so confusing" (Charli xcx's 'Brat and it's completely different but also still brat,' 2024)
After years of miscommunicating their way into something like frenemy territory, Lorde and Charli xcx worked it out on this impeccable remix, which the latter dropped by surprise just two weeks after releasing Brat in the summer of 2024.
Charli lays out the foundational twists and turns of the pair's once-fractious relationship, from half-hearted attempts at collaborating in the past to being compared by fans and critics alike as two sides of the same coin. On her verse, Lorde takes accountability for her part in the love-hate relationship, even if some of her actions were completely unintentional ("Your life seemed so awesome/ I never thought for a second/ My voice was in your head," she admits).
The Kiwi superstar also gets fearlessly candid on her verse about a lifetime of personal struggles: developing disordered eating habits, being "at war in my body" in the wake of releasing Solar Power, or still feeling haunted by schoolyard taunts ("Girl, you walk like a b—, when I was 10 someone said that/ And it's just self-defense until you're building a weapon"). Ultimately, the remix serves as an empowering statement of femininity and girlhood — themes Lorde would soon revisit in new, fluid ways on Virgin.
"Man of the Year" ('Virgin,' 2025)
Lorde's daring Easter egg at the 2025 Met Gala made thrilling sense when she unveiled the music video for Virgin's second single. One minute into the visual, the singer removes her white t-shirt to plaster three strips of silver duct tape across her chest — instantly calling back to the Thom Browne look while revealing that she, herself, is the titular "Man of the Year."
As the track's sparse instrumentation crescendos into a crashing, cacophonous wall of sound, Lorde considers her changing relationship with gender expression and fluidity in the wake of a recent and necessary "ego death." "How I hope that I'm remembered/ My gold chain, my shoulders, my face in the light/ I didn't think he'd appear/ Let's hear it for the man of the year," she sings in a moment of awestruck self-discovery — which feels all the more potent after hearing the artist admit, "I cover up all the mirrors, I can't see myself yet" on Virgin's previously released lead single "What Was That."
"I pictured the person who wanted to be singing that song on a stage in front of people: it was me in my jeans, and I wanted to be shirtless. Just in a chain and my jeans," she toldRolling Stone of choosing to use the tape as a sort of binding in the visual. "I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, 'That's…that's me. That's who I am.' I really just saw my body as an extension of the work of art."
"Hammer" ('Virgin,' 2025)
Like many of Lorde's most nuanced and thoughtful singles, "Hammer" builds expertly on what came before it by deepening the themes and urban motifs she distilled on both "Man of the Year" and "What Was That."
"I burn and I sing and I scheme and I dance/ Some days I'm a woman, some days I'm a man/ I might have been born again/ I'm ready to feel like I don't have the answers," Lorde sings on the urgent, euphoric track, which she revealed will open the album and cheekily described as "an ode to city life and horniness."
And while she closes out "Hammer" by offering it up to the listener as a "postcard from the edge," the song is just the start of the soul-baring journey Lorde takes on Virgin.
"It definitely just felt like a statement that I had to make, really, to go forward," the superstar revealed about the album in an interview with Apple Music 1 just days before its release. "Really, like, everything on Virgin felt like if I don't make this group of statements, my throat's gonna stay locked up, you know? Each of them had to come out, come what may."