Lorde pulled back the curtain on the making of her 2025 album Virgin on Friday with a massive one-year anniversary celebration that included a personal essay and the posting of 49 demos from the album’s sessions.
“On Sunday night I was putting my clothes away and realised Virgin had been out for almost a year. I decided something had to be done about that,” she wrote in a lengthy essay to fans. “To be honest I haven’t really known how to talk about Virgin since it came out. I’d thought I was accustomed and even a bit desensitised to marketing and commodifying my feelings at this point in my life, but sharing Virgin felt raw and exposing in a new way.* I interviewed poorly, couldn’t write here, haven’t posted much. ”
The note was accompanied by an eclectic group of unreleased tunes, some dating back to 2022, including the sleepy-whisper-over-bubbling-beat opener “Holding a Hammer,” a deconstructed, more ethereal version of album opener “Hammer”; she also posted four other versions of the tune, with all five featuring slightly different musical beds and effects.
“I think I needed to just be quiet for a while. It also makes sense to me that such physical work would resist being trapped with language. But some time has passed, and I wanna try to find the words,” she continued in her note. “The self absorption and belief required make you tough to be around. You disappear completely into your own world, always sort of muttering, constantly on the edge of a breakthrough. The work is really bad for a long time, you’re have to live in the wrongness and hack your way out. Sometimes the discomfort and mundanity are hard to see past, but every single day making Virgin was a total gift. I had the sense that I was setting myself free, building a holy site. I laid each layer with utmost care.”
The singer said she was trying to heal herself during the sessions of what she described as a “brief but long-gestating eating disorder,” as well as a recent breakup and an earlier diagnosis of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), a severe form of PMS. “I concentrated on singing to myself the way I needed to be sung to. Gradually I put music and language to old stories I had been scared to tell. I purged them out of me and felt lighter. Living in these songs had an incantatory effect. I felt myself change.”
The singer also praised an album she said inspired her, Charli xcx’s headline-grabbing Brat — “a weather system of fearlessness and fragility” — lauding the “360” singer for keeping her “close and [giving] me the perfect amount of space.”
Also included in the dump is the funky instrumental “Flux Day 2,” as well as a handful of alt versions of the single “What Was That,” with different beats and musical backgrounds and a trio of takes on the spare “Chewing Gum.” Other album tracks that get the multiple-version treatment include “Man of the Year,” “Current Affairs,” “Clear Blue,” “GRWM” and “If She Could See Me Now,” all of which fascinatingly pull back the curtain on the singer’s recording process and eclectic studio experimentation.
Virgin, the singer’s fourth studio album, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.
The demos are collected on the new XRAYS site, along with a slew of photos, including close-ups of what the singer described as acne that was “a thick beard going down my neck” and a shot of what appears to be her be-thonged backside peeking through a pair of skin-tone hose with a butt cut-out. The photos also include shots of the now-29-year-old singer as a teenager and other snaps from her youth dubbed “archival research,” alongside outtakes from the Virgin promo shoot.
“Last year we played around with making an album worth of these skeleton versions, cool composites of a few different versions,” Lorde explained. “But on Sunday night, I realised true X-rays of Virgin would be realer, funnier, more revealing of crookedness and slant, less about where we ended up than celebratory of the way of travelling, the repetitions, the acne, the journey.
“Making an album is an absurd act,” she offered. “The self-absorption and belief required make you tough to be around. You disappear completely into your own world, always sort of muttering, constantly on the edge of a breakthrough. The work is really bad for a long time, you’re have to live in the wrongness and hack your way out. Sometimes the discomfort and mundanity are hard to see past, but every single day making Virgin was a total gift.”
