Lorde is having quite the day. After releasing Virgin, her new album, in the early hours, she headed to Worthy Farm for the Glastonbury Festival, delivering a not-so-secret set to a packed crowd on the Woodsies Stage.
Prior to all of that, though, she sat down with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe to discuss the making of Virgin and some of the sounds that were used to create it.
It turns out that one of the key collaborators on the record was producer, keyboard player, songwriter and audio engineer Buddy Ross. He was brought on board by Jim-E Stack, who produced the majority of Virgin’s 12 tracks alongside Lorde.
Discussing Hammer, the album opener, Lorde says that she and Stack wrote the initial version of it towards the back end of 2023, but decided it wasn’t going to be on the record. That changed, though, a few months later.
“Spring ‘24, Jim-E linked up with Buddy Ross, who sort of did a whole bunch of different stuff for it,” says Lorde. “Jim-E kind of wrangled this version together. He played it to me on FaceTime, and I was like, hey, Hammer's back. It's back on the album.”
Lorde goes on to say that it was Ross’s work on Hammer that helped to shape the sound of the whole album (he’s involved on four tracks in total).
“I feel like, actually, that was a really cool kind of, you know, piece of the blueprint, just sonically, like, I just tried to keep it as raw and pure as possible. Buddy’s sounds are so earthy, and there's such a purity to them, and they're unmistakably machine made.”
Ross certainly has an excellent pedigree: he worked extensively on Frank Ocean’s Blonde album and has also collaborated with the likes of Haim, Miley Cyrus, Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend. But, although Lorde clearly warmed to his sonic sensibilities, she says that Virgin’s sound overall isn’t too complicated.
“The palette of the album is actually quite simple,” she confirms. “We use a lot of the same stuff over and over. And he thought of all the sounds we chose, which we chose so carefully, as my voices, you know - these machines are singing and crying and talking, you know, or laughing, in the same way that we do.”
Other notable collaborators on Virgin include Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan producer Dan Nigro, Dev Hynes and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon.
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