Lorde‘s new album Virgin is chock-full of the rawest, most vulnerable songs she’s ever written. And in a post celebrating the project three days after its release, the pop star revealed which of those tracks was by far the most difficult to create (while also appearing to tease a deluxe version of the album).
Sharing the Virgin album cover via Instagram on Monday (June 30), Lorde asked fans to comment their favorite songs on the track list before sharing “some L4 facts” in list form. For instance, the singer writes that “David” was the first song she started but one of the last ones she finished, while the last song she started was “Clearblue.”
The track that challenged her most, however, was “Favourite Daughter,” according to the post. “Hardest song was FD, to write, to produce, to sing,” Lorde shared in her caption. “Kicked my a–.”
It’s easy to see why “Favourite Daughter” might have given Lorde a run for her money. Placed fifth on the Virgin tracklist, it cuts right to the heart of the Grammy winner’s complicated relationship with her mother, poet Sonja Yelich.
“Panic attack just to be your favorite daughter,” Lorde sings on the Jim-E Stack-produced anthem. “Everywhere I run, I’m always running to ya/ Breaking my back to carry the weight of your heart.”
Also in her post, the musician talked about sampling Dexta Daps’ “Morning Love” in “Current Affairs” after dreaming about doing so for eight years — “It’s so sexy and murky to me, and I loved the contrast w the really organic fragile guitar stuff,” she wrote — and opened up about experiencing “constant insomnia” while making Virgin. “I wrote most of the [“Favourite Daughter”] lyrics, [“Current Affairs”] first verse, “Clearblue” and “David” second verse right before dawn,” Lorde revealed.
But one fact that will be sure to catch fans’ eyes in particular is that, according to Lorde, she scrapped a song from the tracklist “last minute” — but it might just surface someday. “I thought it diluted the vision!” the New Zealand native wrote of the cut track. “One of my absolute favs that I wrote with Fabi.”
She then hinted, “Couple really good B sides knocking around actually.”
Released June 27, Virgin marks Lorde’s first full-length in four years. Despite debuting more than a decade ago, the star had only released three albums prior to the new LP: Pure Heroine (2013), Melodrama (2017) and Solar Power (2021). All three of those projects reached the top 10 of the Billboard 200.
Lorde is now gearing up to embark on her Ultrasound World Tour in support of Virgin, kicking off Sept. 17 in Texas. In her post, the musician teased: “Love u, thank u so much for listening. Got a show to cook now.”
See Lorde’s post below.
