Lorde Details ‘Virgin’ Song ‘Clearblue’ About Taking Pregnancy Test

Lorde knows that she has a tendency to unravel her listeners through her music. It’s why “Ribs” from her debut Pure Heroine is so effective, and why Melodrama can feel at once like walking across shards of glass and experiencing an euphoric release. But the singer-songwriter’s upcoming fourth studio album, Virgin, has some moments that even she finds herself dismantled by.

During a recent appearance on the Therapuss podcast with Jake Shane, Lorde revealed that she avoids playing back the album deep cut “Clearblue.” “There’s a song that I love so much called ‘Clearblue’ that is about unprotected sex,” she said. “And just the experience of taking a pregnancy test, and like, this flood of emotions that goes through your body … That whole song just destroys me. I can’t even really listen to it.”

Virgin, out June 27, is shaping up to be Lorde’s most visceral album yet. The cover art for the record is an X-ray of her pelvis that shows the exact placement of her IUD. In her recent Rolling Stone cover story, Lorde shared: “I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity. It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.”

Essential to the process that resulted in Virgin was Lorde’s explorative experience re-learning her body and its boundaries. “[I’ve] been in the same body [my] whole life. I understood it. I was like, ‘These arms climbed the jungle gym. And they held an award on a TV show.’ I understood the whole spectrum of it and began to enjoy the complexity and ruggedness,” she said. “My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room.”

So far, Lorde has previewed Virgin with “Man of the Year” and “What Was That.”