Pure Heroine Was My First Love, But Virgin is My Soulmate
By Loralei Barro
March 31, 2026
Graphic by Mari Salomao
In all of its glory, the blueprint for the next era of Tumblr reposts and every high school girls’ discography. New Zealand singer-songwriter Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor is a girl’s best friend. Ella, as Lorde, epitomized quintessential teenagehood at the ripe age of sixteen. “Pure Heroine” emerged.
“Pure Heroine” remains a time capsule of the monotonous, the 'what ifs', and the rush of the ordinary. “Tennis Courts” sets the stage for the rest of the album. It captures those rose quartz and serene summers, where your rebellion only manifests in the form of sneaky gas station trips. Your hair reeks of chlorine. The sunlit water soaked your Twenty One Pilots t-shirt from Hot Topic. So what if the shoplifted Takis stained your fingertips red? You never cared.
Gettin’ caught’s half of the trip though, isn’t it?
The adrenaline dies. Norepinephrine takes over. The album shortly transitions into the acclaimed “400 Lux”. This track holds a place in seven of my playlists for a reason. Nothing feels more tranquil than listening to “400 Lux” against your flattened pillow. The synth moves from sunrise to sunset, sunroof all the way down. It falls into the lap of any bored, suburban yearner. Lorde carefully paints that pit-in-your-stomach feeling from riding in your questionably-old-boyfriend’s passenger seat. You feel so grown up in his car. With nothing better to do than drive around blank parking lots, Lorde poses the question:
We’re never done with killing time,
Can I kill it with you?
Till the veins run red and blue?
Moments like this remind me of my life’s minuteness in the grand spiral of the universe. I love this suburban predictability. I love aimlessly existing until the end of time. However, sometimes this boredom morphs into redundant cliques. “White Teeth Teens” bluntly portrays the desire to fit into teenage superficiality, even if you never particularly liked the “cool kids”. Whether it was the VSCO girls, the American Eagle teens, or simply the popular group, Lorde’s track about the feeling of being othered resonates with the disparate youth. Despite the desire to fit in, Lorde insists on the idea that otherness bleeds through. No matter what, there is no point in fitting in.
I’ll let you in on something big. I am not a white teeth teen. I tried to join, but never did.
“Ribs”. In the midst of house parties and Lover’s Spit, the daunting feeling of time comes from beneath you. It feels bittersweet tracing it all back.
And I’ve never felt more alone.
It feels so scary getting old.
Instead of suppressing the distant ache, you embrace the fear. It almost excites you till you revel with your childhood friend.
And laughing till our ribs get tough
But that will never be enough.
The bones grow stronger and the ribs toughen. The strain does not exhibit carefreeness. Nothing will amount to the innocence you once felt, and that makes it all the more wondrous. Time took its toll on you for the better.
“A World Alone”. Time becomes faster as you get older; graduation caps, part-time barista jobs, and the weight of the rest of your world on your shoulders. How do they think an eighteen year old can predetermine their whole life in one college counselor session?
They’re studying business, I’m studying the floor.
Is it boredom or separation that causes me to lose interest? How much longer can we talk about LinkedIn connections and internship postings? I wonder how aimless they think of my life.
This conclusive track epitomizes the grownup experience of learning to accept your own path. Even in a crowd of people, it becomes easy to drown in the noise and no longer feel that close-knit togetherness between your high school friend group.
One day the blood won’t flow so gladly. One day we’ll all get still.
You cannot be sixteen forever. You miss the predictability of high school. You know Wednesdays are for crunchy tacos. Likely, smoking that half-carcinogenic THC cart was your biggest risk. Your period is never late. Growing pains can suck, but the gratification of being a fully-fledged adult is also pretty cool.
Being in your twenties means accepting the vessel the world granted you, embracing your sexuality, and producing one of the best albums in the past decade: “Virgin”. Lorde’s album “Virgin” explores the raw and visceral navigation of adulthood. She uses a word pervasively associated with chastity, and reclaims it as being a woman one-in-herself. Independent, but not inexperienced.
Through the track “Hammer”, Lorde anecdotes the primitive, tender moments of ovulation after initially ending birth control. This song is sensual. Hormonal. It embraces a buildup that never quite falls back down, almost emulating an orgasmic feeling.
Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation.
When you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This newly founded impulse makes you flirt with life itself. Everything becomes a target of affection within this erotic euphoria. After the initial electrifying moments of ovulation, it mellows into the luteal phase. This cyclical bleeding makes you grapple with femininity and face it head on. Between the lowered libido and water retention, Lorde realizes there is less that connects her to femininity than she thought. Remember how I said being an adult is pretty cool? It also means you never have to wear that tacky Christmas dress your mom oh-so adores.
The track “Man Of The Year” unearths this gender paradigm and strips itself of any conventionality. White tee, blue jeans, silver tape, and Devonte Hynes’ chilling cello instrumentals. Lorde crumbles up the binary and throws it at a wall.
Take my knife and I cut the cord
My babe can’t believe I’ve become someone else,
Someone more like myself.
This umbilical cord has been tugging at my navel for my whole existence. As the surgical blade glides through, the severance brings a whirlwind of apprehension. I finally know who I am, but what do I lose in choosing myself?
Who’s gon’ love me like this?
“Clearblue”. Unprotected, vulnerable, and spiraling. How sobering is the morning after? Sitting impatiently on the toilet with your eyes glued on the pregnancy strip. Without the second line, what connection remains between us?
There’s broken blood in me, it passed through my mother from her mother down to me.
I feel you answer, my hips moving faster, I rode you ‘til I cried.
Graphic by Mari Salomao
God, does sex always contain intrusive thoughts? After ascending to nirvana, your face plummets to the gravel. This solitude on the bathroom floor unravels generational trauma. However, letting the broken blood run clean under the faucet revitalizes you. With a single horizontal blue line, you stand free.
“David”. The rebirth. Carving away everything that was not David. It came easy to center your entire being around him. Is it stupid to think you met your soulmate at sixteen? He made you. He rearranged your juvenile brain chemistry to where you never feel whole without him.
I made you God ‘cause it was all
That I knew how to do.
Who am I without David? This self-made god consumed your mental landscape. However, it eventually hits you one day: you owe them nothing.
But I don’t belong to anyone.
Am I ever gonna love again?
Self-worship demands labor. It takes deep gouging, precise etching, and light chiseling to refurnish your sole spirit. However, liberation catalyzes an inevitable and terrifying fear of anuptaphobia. The calm after the storm always leaves debris. You start to think this innocent kind of love will never find you again.
The secret is: you will love again. It may not feel like it for a while. And I mean a while. It will take multiple Notes app venting sessions, sobbing in the shower, and breakup playlists to feel like yourself again. The Ella before Lorde. But we have our whole lives ahead of us to love.
Tell it to ‘em.
Lorde wrote in a 2016 Facebook post:
‘A note from the desk of a newborn adult’ –
“All my life I’ve been obsessed with adolescence, drunk on it. I knew that teenagers sparkled.
I knew that they knew something that children didn’t know, and that adults end up forgetting,”
I always come back to this. It centers me back to that teenage glow, where the whole world felt more malleable than ever. There is a permanence engrained in adults that makes the sparkle burn to ash. However, Lorde’s music is so much more than reminiscent of sad girl pop. The longing for that teenage dream is not melancholic. It inspires. Lorde reinvented the negative perception of teenage innocence, and lostness within maturity, into something worth encapsulating. For every adult that asks “How would you know?”, Lorde understands the authenticity that arises from being inexperienced in life. Whether it is your first tumultuous relationship, or first ovulation in over a decade, never rehearsing life might be the point.
If you desire a stripped down, “spiky strangeness” as Lorde says, it may be worth putting an earbud in. ■
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