An NSFW picture of Lorde has gone viral, stirring debate on social media about why the singer chose to bare it all for a special-edition release of her new album Virgin.

The photograph, which appears in the vinyl edition of that LP, shows Lorde donning a pair of see-through pants, without any underwear beneath them. Composed so that there is little to see beyond her waist, the picture echoes the album’s cover, an X-ray of the singer’s pelvis by artist Heji Shin.

Artist Talia Chetrit appears to be credited as the photographer of the picture in the liner notes for the vinyl, which were posted to Reddit by fans earlier this week. Chetrit previously photographed Lorde for the cover of one of the album’s singles, “What Was That,” featuring the singer’s face dripping with a translucent substance that may be water, sweat, or something else entirely.

Many of Chetrit’s photographs feature herself and others in various states of undress, often as a comment on how erotic desire and power play a role in how we see. “Power dynamics, agency, sexuality, and the psychology behind imagery have always been an important part of my work,” she told Flash Art in 2018. She has worked on commission for fashion magazines and shown her art in galleries.

Similar pants to the ones worn by Lorde here have also appeared in at least two other pictures by Chetrit, both of them self-portraits. In both, the artist artist poses before a mirror, spreading her legs and holding her camera to her face.

Of Plastic Nude (2016), Amanda Maddox wrote in Aperture last year, “While Chetrit’s see-through garment leaves virtually nothing to the imagination, it’s not exactly titillating by default. Perhaps this image is an evocation of the striptease, which, as Roland Barthes characterized it, ‘is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked.’ Then again, is Chetrit nude? As she leans back against a piano, her plastic-wrapped torso and legs all but open to be viewed, I can’t help but be reminded of the beguiling woman dressed deceptively in a flesh-colored body stocking that E. J. Bellocq photographed a century earlier. In each case, the viewer must look closely to determine if the nudity is an illusion.”

Seen in that light, the new photograph of Lorde speaks to Virgin’s broader concerns with how much one is meant to reveal of their inner self, specifically when it comes to gender. “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” Lorde sings on the opening track, “Hammer.” And of the album more broadly, she has said that, during its making, “I was beginning to understand that my gender was more expansive than I had thought.”

Throughout the run-up to the album, Lorde has subverted gender conventions. In the video for “Man of the Year,” she tapes her breasts and writhes around on a pile of soil that references Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), an iconic work of the Land art movement. That movement has always been aligned with a certain brand of masculinity, even though women such as Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt are also associated with it.

“Today, land art appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege, with its conviction that man is entitled to space to roam, to make his mark; women, however, never enjoyed that privilege,” wrote Megan O’Grady in 2018. Lorde’s mimicry of the De Maria piece seems to upend that notion, as does the closer of Virgin, a song called “David,” whose name may be an allusion to the Michelangelo sculpture, arguably the most famous male nude in art history.

The Virgin vinyl photograph also points up a contradiction: though Lorde has left little of her torso to the imagination, we still can’t see aspects of her gender identity. That much is also obvious based on the Shin photograph on the album’s cover, one of many X-ray photographs she’s taken. As Shin told ARTnews in 2019, “Even if you can see through me, you can understand even less of what’s going on.”

Most social media users haven’t engaged with the artful ideas broached by Chetrit and Shin’s photography for Lorde. Some have questioned why the vinyl’s picture did not gain the controversy that followed a recent Sabrina Carpenter album cover featuring that pop star kneeling before a man who can be seen grabbing her hair. (Carpenter later released new cover art that she jokingly said had been “approved by God.”)

One X post with 86,000 likes appears to mock the photograph as “groundbreaking” while labeling the Carpenter cover “anti-feminist.” Its poster, whose X page notes that they run a parody account, then wrote in a follow-up tweet, “today when us woman are still fighting for our rights, its bizarre that influential people do weird stuff like this for engagement. both covers are very odd.”

In response to that post, one user, apparently referencing Madonna’s 1992 Sex book, wrote, “No need for all the discourse. 90’s Madonna would kill you all.”

Other users have also poked fun at the Virgin picture. “when you open your Virgin vinyl and see lordussy,” reads one tweet accompanied with an iCarly clip in which the actress Miranda Cosgrove enters a room and is met with a blinding flash of light.

On Thursday, Lorde dropped the music video for “Man Of The Year,” the second single from her upcoming fourth album Virgin, featuring the singer, a chair, and a roomful of dirt familiar to fans of artist Walter De Maria.

Described by Lorde as the track she’s “proudest of” on the new album, “Man Of The Year” is a taut ballad about the rough road to self-acceptance. In the accompanying video, the singer removes her T-shirt and binds her breasts with tape. The 28-year-old New Zealander told the Australian radio show Triple J that the track’s title was inspired by attending GQ’s 2023 Man of the Year event and experiencing her notion of gender expression “broaden and shift and bust out of me in this way that was really amazing to me and also really scary and emotional.”

The tape becomes a means of liberation as she leaps, crawls, and cavorts through the dirt pile in a mad modern dance. Following the release of the video, social media users were quick to point out the visual similarities to Walter De Maria’s installation New York Earth Room, which is currently managed by the Dia Art Foundation.

The work debuted in 1977 at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, near Houston Street in Manhattan, and consisted in that iteration of a field of powdery earth. There were no signs about where not to step, just the gallery, the dirt—a mix of peat and bark—and the microorganisms teeming within its ad hoc ecosystem. (The work reportedly grew edible mushrooms, while briefly available for purchase.)

After the gallery’s namesake founder, Heiner Friedrich, helped found the Dia Art Foundation, New York Earth Room was presented to the public as a permanent installation in SoHo in 1980. Per the foundation’s website, the early Dia team scaled up the Earth Room, increasing its total weight to 280,000 pounds and raising its depth to roughly two feet.

In its current iteration, you cannot actually step on the dirt, and indeed, the Lorde video was not filmed in the De Maria installation but is merely an homage to it.

On her website, Lorde said that, with her new song, she was “TRYING TO MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A FONTANA, LIKE PAINTING BITTEN BY A MAN, LIKE THE NEW YORK EARTH ROOM. THE SOUND OF MY REBIRTH.”