There are milestones aplenty for Lorde; this is the opening show of her first proper UK arena tour, the biggest concert by capacity she’s ever played here and, as she says herself, “the first night of this tour where I haven’t had active food poisoning”.
The concept of her body almost letting her down – she had to cancel a gig in Luxembourg last weekend – feels fitting; the album she’s here in support of, June’s Virgin, is one defined by its fascination with her own anatomy.
The record’s cover art is an X-ray of the singer’s pelvis, her IUD visible; she has chosen Ultrasound as the title for this world tour, and one of the album’s most poignant songs shares its name with the world’s leading brand of pregnancy test. Now 29, the Auckland native has already lived several artistic lives in the public eye; Bowie-endorsed teenage prodigy on debut LP Pure Heroine, pop’s ingenious enfant terrible on follow-up Melodrama, and then hippyish dilettante on 2022’s misfire of a third album, Solar Power.
Her moments of overlap with the pop mainstream have been flirtations rather than fixations; early single “Royals” was a viral sensation in a pre-TikTok age, while last year’s verse on the remix of Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing” marked her out as somebody still on the cutting edge: that track, on which the two singers worked through their insecurities candidly and in real time, was less a hit single than it was a post-modern masterpiece.
The cultural currency it afforded Lorde – Ella Yelich-O’Connor, when she’s at home – has played a part in her ascending to arena level this time around; she chose theatres on her last couple of tours, always seeming as if full-blown stardom was something that she was deliberately keeping at arm’s length. Tonight’s most pressing question was how she’d deal with being thrust into this kind of spotlight, in front of crowds as big as this one.
Stylishly, is the answer. Whilst she’s backed by a full live band, they play from recessed positions behind the stage, meaning that save for a pair of backing dancers, the stage is all Lorde’s own. Musically, Virgin is a record designed to work on the body, all pulsing bass and thumping drums; the likes of “Hammer”, “Shapeshifter” and “Broken Glass” more than fill the room, and conjure up brooding atmosphere in the process.
Which isn’t to say it’s a solemn affair; there are myriad full-throated singalongs, from “Royals” – dispatched early on – to “Buzzcut Season”, “Supercut” and “The Louvre”, songs that are sonically different but united by the common thematic thread of youthful abandon. The most striking moments are all taken from Virgin, though, not least because there’s something genuinely audacious about singing songs so raw and intimate in front of so many people.
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The band take the stage for the record’s standout, “Current Affairs”, and encircle her, as if to protect her whilst she publicly sifts through the wreckage of a broken relationship. She often sings nakedly; musically speaking on “Clearblue”, which is largely a capella, and more literally in the case of “GRWM”, for which she drops her jeans and performs in her underwear. By the standards of the modern arena show, there are few bells and whistles, but she compensates for it with flourishes like these, the sort of thing you’d associate more with performance art than a pop concert.
There are moments that fit the pop mould too, though: an anthemic “Team” is a case in point, as is the piano-house euphoria of “Green Light”. For the encore, she plays “Ribs”, introducing it as her most “sacred” song; it’s also her very best, a glorious treatise on the beauty and terror of coming of age that – scarcely believably – she wrote at the age of 15.
For Lorde, the road to bona fide pop stardom has been much thornier and less linear than it looked like it would be when she first emerged, over a decade ago, but she’s here now, and it feels as if she’s earned it.
Lorde continue her tour at the O2 Arena in London on 16 November before continuing her tour.
