Lorde, Getty Images Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story On Friday (June 26), Lorde celebrated the one-year anniversary of Virgin by unveiling 49 demos from the album’s recording sessions and penned a long, behind-the-scenes newsletter to her fans. Among the archived material uploaded to the pop star’s website are photographs, notes, artwork ideas, and the aforementioned tracks, which she calls “skeletons” of what would become Virgin . It’s all housed on a new page of her website labeled XRAYS .
“Last year we played around with making an album worth of these skeleton versions, cool composites of a few different versions,” Lorde wrote in the newsletter. “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. Like Eric said, truly you is beautiful. It’s how I’m trying to live.”
Lorde also gave a broad overview of what her life looked like at the time of working on Virgin and the struggles she went through, including an eating disorder, a diagnosis of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, and a breakup. “I concentrated on singing to myself the way I needed to be sung to,” she wrote. “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.”
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. 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. 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.
Making an album is an absurd act. 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.
I was trying to heal myself of a brief but long gestating eating disorder. I had recently deleted Myfitnesspal. The week we started what would become Shapeshifter and What Was That I was working on believing that breakfast wasn’t a negotiation. I made myself drink a smoothie every morning, went to work when I wanted to run away, kept trying, one foot in front of the other.
I was going through a breakup. Instead of hotels I stayed in the spare beds and on the couches of many friends. The care these women showed me through this time is a huge reason Virgin exists. In 2024 one of these friends looked me in the eye and said evenly, you seem to fall into this intense depression about the album every time you get your period. Some months after that I was diagnosed with PMDD.
I wore a pair of men’s jeans...