Every now and again, I hear a song that sounds like lightning.
Lightning doesn’t make a sound, you’re saying. The sound is called thunder.
I know, I’m saying back. I wrote what I wrote. Some songs sound the way the forest feels at dusk. Some sound like the full moon. Some sound like lightning. Logic doesn’t matter in the realm of art. Not the same way it matters in the other realms. Here, what matters is the feeling. And maybe that’s what I’m trying to say, really. Not that they sound like this or that, but that they feel some way.
Nettles feels like the forest. Butterfly feels like the full moon. David feels like lightning.
One week ago, Lorde released her fourth studio album titled Virgin. Like all Lorde albums, it took me a few listens and a dive into the lyrics to unpack it. That’s one of the reasons I love her artistry so much. Lorde is a weaver. A poet. She says so much with so few words, with such little production. She’s the kind of artist who’s easy to write off after a first listen. I think her work requires several listens to swallow. Many to digest. Countless to understand.
On my first listen through the album, I felt it was somewhat skeletal. Bare bones. A single bassline here. A whole song with no backtrack, just vocals, there. My first reaction was one of parasocial indignance. I waited four years for this? There’s hardly anything here!
I listened through a few times, sent some initial thoughts to the group chat, then set it down. Slept on it. The next morning, I woke up thinking about the electronic, shimmering hook on Current Affairs. That one line in If She Could See Me Now, where Lorde sings “the bodies move like the spirits inside them”. The build on Man of the Year.
I listened again that Saturday and began to realize maybe I’d missed something. Sure, the beat on Shapeshifter was chaotic, but the moment the strings came in was so full of energy. And Clearblue, the song with only vocals, was poetic and heartbreaking. Actually, I like this album, I began to realize. A lot.
Every song on the album landed differently in me on day two, but none more so than the album closer, titled David. On that song, Lorde laments “Was I just someone to dominate? … / Was I just young blood to get on tape?” She’s singing about giving her all to someone who didn’t earn it. About being young and full of potential and being robbed of it by someone more powerful than you. About broken trust.
The song crescendoes slowly, Lorde’s vocals going from a whimper at the opening to a distorted battle cry of sorts by the second chorus as she declares “I don’t belong to anyone” and it feels like victory. For a moment, she’s breaking free, her voice is fraying, the music swelling. And then, with a single mallet hit, a flash of lightning, the wave crashes. Lorde’s voice falls again to a whisper.
“Am I ever gon’ love again?” she asks.
Over. And over. And over.
After abuse, after domination, there may be a moment of celebration. A declaration of independence, if you will. I don’t belong to anyone, you roar, and it feels like freedom. And then the wheel turns again. Lightning strikes. You find yourself alone in a room holding a mirror, wondering who you are, if you can trust yourself or if you’re even capable of love. You’re singing to the fountain as the birds fly in formation overhead, and everything is still. So still. Too still.
I don’t know how she does it, but every time Lorde releases an album, it feels like she’s been right there with me since the last one, walking the same path. Not everything is exactly the same between our lives, of course not, but the themes are. Always. A return to innocence. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental.
In her announcement for the album, Lorde wrote that the color of the album was clear. The cover is an x-ray. Everything is see-through. Stripped down. Bare bones. Raw and wide open.
We’re not saviors, but we’re a little melodramatic. Pure heroines mistaken for featherweights searching for everything we’ve given away. Innocence. Virginity. Opacity. We’ll never get them back, but that’s okay. They were overrated anyway.