On Lorde, Virgin and running away

Pull up Lorde’s discography on any platform, and a near perfect spectrum of blue spills across the screen. The saturated near-black of Pure Heroine melts into the cobalt of Melodrama, into the powder blue of Solar Power, into the translucent cerulean of Virgin. On Melodrama, David Hockney-esque sharp edges of colour flood from above, across the crags of the duvet and onto her cheeks, cast in an electric glow. On her latest, the shifting tones pick out a zipper, an IUD, and the hard texture of bone illuminated on an X-ray. “The blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it,” writes Maggie Nelson in Bluets, her lyrical ode to the colour blue. “In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.”

Ecstatic accident is, coincidentally, a perfect tagline for these albums and their thematic obsessions, which largely revolve around desire, heartache, and enduring the chaos of being a person. It is also a perfect tagline for desire itself, and the lightning bolt upheaval it can wreak across your life. Melodrama in particular, an album I fell in love with only in recent years and which seemed to sum up their sudden euphorias and dissolutions, is all about moments of simultaneous generation and rupture – that is to say, void and fire – in which a single house party allows for both heady self-discovery and sober reckoning.

This constant negotiation of pleasure and limitation, freedom and responsibility, is the essence of the coming-of-age narrative, but it also stretches long past adolescence, punctuating the various growing pains that structure our lives. It’s a tension that winds throughout Lorde’s music, through the teen longing of Pure Heroine, the first heartbreak of Melodrama, the determined introspection of Solar Power, and the regeneration of Virgin, an album that knows full well that coming-of-age is a lifelong, unending project. Across her albums, Lorde marks herself as the patron saint of chasing the high, the irresistible doubled dose of drugs and falling in love; and of attending to its inevitable comedown, the unglamorous work of disentangling yourself from fantasy.

I am five years older than Lorde, but I still can’t imagine what it would be like to experience desire and love not as fantasy, but as some kind of solid ground. My life feels very distinctly bifurcated by their absence and presence, to the extent that I often struggle to experience it as a single coherent and ongoing thread, rather than a series of small deaths and rebirths. The extremities of emotion that come with this, of existing either in a perennial state of longing or in the sudden intoxication of its fulfilment, has made it very difficult not to chase the high at any cost. "Do not however make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning," writes Nelson in Bluets. But to me it is, and I think it is in Lorde’s music too. Maybe that's the problem. If you think the only way to want something is to have it be just out of reach, either unlikely or ill-advised, there is very little safety net when it falls into your hands.

There’s that meme that does the rounds every few years, which goes something like, “As an adult you can just buy a birthday cake anytime and eat it yourself. Nobody stops you.” It’s true. You can buy a birthday cake anytime. You can do anything. Anything – its checklist of possible ecstasies and disasters – spills across Lorde's music, a siren call of unrealised potential that marks the beginning of adolescent agency and never quite goes away. 'MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up / We kissed for hours straight, well, baby, what was that?', she sings on What Was That; 'King and queen of the weekend / Ain't a pill that could touch our rush', she sings on Sober.

Looking at my own life, I am not sure capitulating to my capacity for pleasure – flooding my brain with serotonin and falling in love with people I wanted badly who did not want me the same – has done that much to improve it, but it is true that no one did stop me. And it is the tipping point of such agency that preoccupies Lorde’s music, and is perhaps why it preoccupies me in turn. How do we acknowledge the actualising power of our most destructive impulses? How do we reconcile our desires with the harm they might do us? Is it really harm, if it is what we wanted?

If I try to imagine the platonic ideal of a teen film, Lorde plays in the background. There’s a scene: maybe it’s summer, maybe someone is careening towards the horizon on rollerskates, maybe the day is shifting into a deep orange glow. So much of her music is about this sense of freedom, about the threshold times and spaces where you can tip into a different, new version of yourself: unseen late hours, anonymous streets of a nondescript town, brain chemicals askew. 'And I'll never go home again / Place the call, feel it start', she sings on Buzzcut Season, about the holographic new landscape of love. But listening to it all without the rose-coloured optimism of adolescence, I’m struck how much of it is really about running – either from or towards something, but really always away. Sometimes it’s a town. Sometimes it’s a person. Sometimes it’s heartbreak. Most of the time, it’s yourself.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel, in some way, trapped in my body, a physical manifestation of a much broader lack of control that I am constantly trying to escape, with whatever moments of pleasure I can piece together. I am aware of the fact of myself all the time, a level of consciousness that has sat like a distorting smear over my life and has made my relationships with various embodied experiences – food, sex, exercise, almost anything – extremely complicated. Half-hearted fingers down the back of the throat at interim points, the body horror sensation of stretching after eating, skin burning to the touch after sleeping with someone, a source of suffocation when alone. Many days it takes me an hour to decide what to wear, quiet panic setting in. “Don’t you think it’s terrible to have a body,” I asked a friend once. “No, I think it’s wonderful,” she said. I looked at her like she was crazy.

It’s an idea that preoccupies Lorde too, most famously on her verse of Charli xcx’s Girl, So Confusing ('I've been at war with my body / I tried to starve myself thinner / And then I gained all the weight back / I was trapped in the hatred', she sings; “Fucking hell,” Charli replies on the text conversation she leaked when the song dropped), but also again and again on Virgin, an album that, briefly, stops running away to face the mess of it all head on.

If Melodrama was about being caught in the spiralling downfall of your own agency, Virgin rethinks agency not as a blank cheque of possibility but as the ability to sit within the grey areas. The body not as something to fight, but to reimagine. Heartbreak not as something to escape, but to examine with tender bewilderment. The desire to be loved not as something to recklessly pursue, but to look for inwards. 'When I'm in the blue light, I can make it alright', she sings on What Was That. It’s a shift away from the Gatsby-like pull towards fantasy that began Melodrama eight years before. There’s a kind of clarity – first devastating, then healing – that gets cast in this new light.

Void and fire. That ecstatic accident of staring into the abyss and distracting yourself from it again and again – pulling something across the veil to not entirely face what is there. It can produce something beautiful, I think. It produces the colour blue, apparently, that sits smudged across Lorde’s album art; it produced four of her records; and it produces all of our lives, alternately unbearable and euphoric, a kaleidoscope of everything we have ever wanted and gotten and lost. 'I don’t belong to anyone', Lorde sings on the final track of Virgin, before adding, 'Am I ever gonna love again?' And there is nothing to resolve the contradiction this time, no high and no escape. We are just left with the questions, their ecstatic, unending possibilities.

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Virgin is out now via EMI; Lorde plays the OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 19 Nov