Like myself and, statistically, you, Lorde spends too much time online. “The liquid crystal is in my grip,” she intones on “Hammer”—her preferred term for the devices that fit in our pockets yet are somehow supposed to know everything. Throughout the final pre-release single and opening track from Virgin, the reluctant star scrolls through aura photography, astrology, past lives, and the divine feminine, on the prowl for some clarity or at least a good screw. Her smartphone has become a divining rod, mapping out a path from Canal Street to Washington Square Park in her adopted home of New York City. The Lorde of Solar Power’s “Mood Ring” derided the frivolities of wellness culture, but here she admits, “I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers.”

Pure Heroine and Melodrama cast Lorde as an older sister to my generation. She’d hit the young-adult life milestones a few years earlier and wrote songs to hand down her hard-won wisdom, as if to promise, “One day, you’ll be cool.” I think that’s why it’s been a bit destabilizing to watch her so publicly, messily work through her relationships to gender and fame. If “What Was That” and “Man of the Year” could’ve stayed in the drafts, so to speak, then “Hammer” is punchier and more pop, a song on its way to someplace. Jim-E Stack’s production races forward with the frisson of an unquiet mind, kick drums and clipped vocals smearing like we’re already at the club. And Lorde’s there too. “It’s a beautiful life/So I play truant,” she sings, burning and scheming and dancing right alongside us.