Lorde has marked the first anniversary of Virgin by releasing 49 demo recordings, photographs and personal notes from the album sessions, while revealing the eating disorder, breakup and PMDD diagnosis that shaped the record.
by Paul Cashmere
Lorde has opened the archives of her 2025 album Virgin, releasing 49 demo recordings and a collection of photographs, notes and artwork concepts through a new section of her website titled XRAYS. The New Zealand singer-songwriter timed the release to coincide with the first anniversary of the album and accompanied the material with a lengthy newsletter detailing the personal struggles that informed the project.
The release offers fans an unusually detailed look at the development of Virgin, an album that became one of Lorde’s most personal works. Rather than issuing polished alternate versions, Lorde said she wanted listeners to hear what she called the album’s “skeletons”, unfinished recordings that documented the process rather than the destination.
“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,” she wrote.
The XRAYS collection includes early sketches of songs that would eventually become key moments on the album. Lorde said she and her collaborators had previously considered creating an album of composite demo versions but abandoned the idea in favour of sharing the recordings in their original form.
The singer also used the anniversary to reflect on the circumstances surrounding the creation of Virgin. She revealed that she was recovering from an eating disorder and had recently deleted the calorie-tracking app MyFitnessPal when work began on songs including Shapeshifter and What Was That.
“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,” she wrote.
Lorde said she was also navigating a relationship breakup and spent periods living on friends’ couches and in spare bedrooms. She credited the support of those friends as a major reason the album exists. During the same period she was diagnosed with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, or PMDD, after a friend observed a recurring pattern of depression linked to her menstrual cycle.
The singer described the making of Virgin as both emotionally exhausting and transformative. “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.”
Virgin represented a significant moment in Lorde’s catalogue. It followed 2021’s Solar Power and marked a return to more direct and emotionally exposed songwriting. The album’s X-ray artwork became symbolic of its broader themes of self-examination and vulnerability. Lorde said she initially feared the imaging process would somehow reveal an inner “ugliness and wrongness”, but was reassured by collaborator Eric, who told her, “It’s a picture of you, any way you are today is perfect and right.”
The anniversary release also reflects a growing trend among major artists to grant audiences access to works in progress and creative archives. In recent years artists including Charli xcx, James Blake, Drake and Taylor Swift have released demos, voice notes and studio materials to strengthen fan engagement and provide greater insight into the creative process.
For Lorde, the gesture appears closely aligned with the themes of Virgin itself. Songs such as Broken Glass addressed her recovery from disordered eating, while David confronted questions of identity and belonging with uncommon directness. The release of XRAYS extends that transparency beyond the finished recordings and into the often uncertain process of making them.
Lorde also acknowledged that releasing Virgin left her emotionally depleted. She said she struggled to discuss the record publicly after its release, conducted interviews poorly and largely withdrew from posting online. At one point she searched for information about burnout symptoms and said she is now taking an SSRI and feeling “much better”.
The singer ended her message by thanking fans for making space for “any facet of my art project” and hinted that the archive will eventually be made available on a forthcoming platform called Lume.
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