Lorde Review – A play of profound action and joyful abandon | music

toOrde has been trying to make sense of the harrowing stages of childhood since her 2013 debut Pure Heroine, and as more stars open up their therapy sessions to the public, the New Zealand pop singer is making unselective adolescence a lot less awkward.

A single blue laser sweeps across AO’s 21,000-capacity arena before coming to rest on the singer playing Hammer, barefoot in baggy jeans hanging down her thighs. There’s a theater in downtown New York that’s hanging out through the set and showing their latest release Virgin. The subtle nods to Talking Heads Stop Make Sense pile up as each song brings a new prop and body to clamber across the tabletops in gleeful abandon.

Royals’ drum machines drop, then cameras zoom in on analogue synths tangled in Broken Glass’s patch cables. Behind Ella Yelich-O’Connor, screens flash in a quick blur of electric blue, their display breaking up into pixelated 8-bit dots like a Windows screensaver. “I tasted my underwear, and I knew we had fucked,” she confides to Current Affairs magazine, wearing gray Calvin Klein underwear.

Everything about the current ultrasound tour is viscerally kinetic, as if someone pressed a DVD in the early 2000s. One moment, she’s sprawled on the raised stage, kicking her legs like a teenage girl in bed, and the next, she’s walking on a treadmill, crying to the bouncy song Supercut. There is an emphasis on the body: dancers clip on handheld cameras, film their stomachs attached to screens, and sweat under the lights. The lens twists, capturing the features of Lorde’s body in a small act of self-reclamation. “You’ve got me a bit startled, Manchester,” she exclaimed.

Clear Blue is amazed. She holds a vocoder to her chest Imogen Heap style, her duct-tape bra catching the flashes as she performs intimately in front of a crowd of fans. At the end of the night, the costume changed to see Lorde walking among fans wearing a reflective light-up bike jacket, holding an audience member as he sang to David. There’s a glitch in the live broadcast between her soft face and the pre-recorded image, a digital echo of the night’s performance and past. Lorde truly embodies intimacy and nostalgia like no other.