Sometimes, you need to let yourself fall to pieces just to be able to put yourself back together. That’s something Lorde knows well – a process that fuelled her fourth album ‘Virgin’, released this summer. On that record, the New Zealand pop star presented the most intimate, stripped-down portrait of herself yet, tackling femininity and gender, experiences of womanhood and battles with her body. Now whole again, her Ultrasound world tour is an opportunity to celebrate coming through that time and everything she’s learned.
As the tour arrives in London for the first of two nights at The O2, Lorde keeps her stage intentionally bare – a canvas that’s not completely blank, but a dark grey expanse occasionally littered with props to help her tell the stories in her songs better. It captures that sense of picking up the pieces and rebuilding; holding on to the most important elements and letting everything else fall by the wayside.
That’s not to say it’s not also visually arresting. When the opening blare of ‘Hammer’ reverberates around the arena, blue lights pierce across the stage, taking your attention to a trapdoor at the end of a short runway through which Lorde soon rises up, belt of neon blue light strapped around her waist. For ‘Shapeshifter’, a ring of lights descends to shine around her torso, blue images flashing on a boxy screen that’s been wheeled behind her as if she’s getting an ultrasound right in front of us. As ‘Melodrama’’s ‘Supercut’ reaches its second half, she moves from her position curled up at the end of the runway and starts running on a blue-lit treadmill.
There’s a sense of intimacy that comes with a show like this, even in an arena. The intentionally used production doesn’t overshadow the songs or their performer, and the moments where it’s just Lorde, her band and two dancers on stage feel closer and quieter. The way the show is filmed plays into that – a selfie cam passed around the star and her dancers, taking close-ups of their faces during ‘400 Lux’; the artist’s face zoomed in on the screen at the back of the room as she crouches for a heartfelt ‘Liability’.
So, too, do some of her presentations of ‘Virgin’’s songs. During ‘Broken Glass’, she purposefully, steadily, unbuckles her belt and pulls the prong through the holes in time with the beat. As she sings “You tasted my underwear / I knew we were fucked” during ‘Current Affairs’, she begins to slip her jeans down her legs until she’s standing in grey pants and t-shirt, which she douses with water for ‘GRWM’, reasoning: “I wrote this song in the shower after kissing someone I really liked, so now when I sing it, I’ve gotta be wet.” The silver duct tape that has become synonymous with this era appears taped across her chest for ‘Man Of The Year’, a performance that ends with her dancing through purple lasers, red light and dry ice for one of the highlights of the night.
The intimate feeling that Lorde creates doesn’t just extend to a crowd voyeuristically watching her from afar, though. She finds ways to bring everyone together, whether telling the London audience how “special” we are for making her feel free and at home when she spent months in the city while making ‘Virgin’, or uniting the arena in cheers as she subtly nods to Palestine during ‘Team’, the stage lights turning green, white and red. “We are a network of bodies,” she tells us after. “Don’t forget it now.”
To forget is something Lorde doesn’t seem to do. After she walks through the crowd during the emotional swell of ‘David’, she climbs onto a small platform near the back of the room and invites her “first fan” and “fifth fan” to join her for one closing moment of euphoria. The three share the almost comically small space for ‘Ribs’, its chorus line of “You’re the only friend I need” even more moving in this context. To fall apart and come back, you need a support system to cushion the fall and help you let go, and for Lorde, this 20,000-strong audience are ready to catch her.
Lorde played:
‘Hammer’
‘Royals’
‘Broken Glass’
‘Buzzcut Season’
‘Favourite Daughter’
‘Perfect Places’
‘Shapeshifter’
‘Current Affairs’
‘Supercut’
‘GRWM’
‘400 Lux’
‘The Louvre’
‘Oceanic Feeling’
‘Big Star’
‘Liability’
‘Clearblue’
‘Man Of The Year’
‘If She Could See Me Now’
‘Team’
‘What Was That’
‘Green Light’
‘David’
‘Ribs’